Laplacian-LoRA: Delaying Oversmoothing in Deep GCNs via Spectral Low-Rank Adaptation

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1. Verfasser: Alisetti, Sai Vamsi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Alisetti, Sai Vamsi
author_facet Alisetti, Sai Vamsi
contents Oversmoothing is a fundamental limitation of deep graph convolutional networks (GCNs), causing node representations to collapse as depth increases. While many prior approaches mitigate this effect through architectural modifications or residual mechanisms, the underlying spectral cause of oversmoothing is often left implicit. We propose Laplacian-LoRA, a simple and interpretable low-rank spectral adaptation of standard GCNs. Rather than redesigning message passing, Laplacian-LoRA introduces a learnable, spectrally anchored correction to the fixed Laplacian propagation operator, selectively weakening contraction while preserving stability and the low-pass inductive bias. Across multiple benchmark datasets and depths, Laplacian-LoRA consistently delays the onset of oversmoothing, extending the effective depth of GCNs by up to a factor of two. Embedding variance diagnostics confirm that these gains arise from delayed representational collapse, while learned spectral analysis demonstrates that the correction is smooth, bounded, and well behaved. Our results show that oversmoothing is a depth-dependent spectral phenomenon that can be systematically delayed through modest, low-rank adaptation of the graph propagation operator.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07278
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Laplacian-LoRA: Delaying Oversmoothing in Deep GCNs via Spectral Low-Rank Adaptation
Alisetti, Sai Vamsi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Oversmoothing is a fundamental limitation of deep graph convolutional networks (GCNs), causing node representations to collapse as depth increases. While many prior approaches mitigate this effect through architectural modifications or residual mechanisms, the underlying spectral cause of oversmoothing is often left implicit. We propose Laplacian-LoRA, a simple and interpretable low-rank spectral adaptation of standard GCNs. Rather than redesigning message passing, Laplacian-LoRA introduces a learnable, spectrally anchored correction to the fixed Laplacian propagation operator, selectively weakening contraction while preserving stability and the low-pass inductive bias. Across multiple benchmark datasets and depths, Laplacian-LoRA consistently delays the onset of oversmoothing, extending the effective depth of GCNs by up to a factor of two. Embedding variance diagnostics confirm that these gains arise from delayed representational collapse, while learned spectral analysis demonstrates that the correction is smooth, bounded, and well behaved. Our results show that oversmoothing is a depth-dependent spectral phenomenon that can be systematically delayed through modest, low-rank adaptation of the graph propagation operator.
title Laplacian-LoRA: Delaying Oversmoothing in Deep GCNs via Spectral Low-Rank Adaptation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07278