Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zosso, Mia, Hariri, Ali, Kawasaki-Borruat, Victor, Berlureau, Pierre-Gabriel, Vandergheynst, Pierre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18141
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916034614657024
author Zosso, Mia
Hariri, Ali
Kawasaki-Borruat, Victor
Berlureau, Pierre-Gabriel
Vandergheynst, Pierre
author_facet Zosso, Mia
Hariri, Ali
Kawasaki-Borruat, Victor
Berlureau, Pierre-Gabriel
Vandergheynst, Pierre
contents Long-range graph tasks are challenging for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): global mechanisms such as attention or rewiring schemes can be computationally expensive, while deep local propagation is prone to vanishing gradients, oversmoothing, and oversquashing. The introduced mu-ChebNet architecture is a simple spectral GNN that learns a node-wise weight function mu before applying ChebNet-style filters. The learned weighting mu induces a modified graph Laplacian which effectively changes the propagation geometry without altering the graph topology. This task-dependent geometry promotes preferred routes for information propagation, thereby helping long-range signals avoid highly contractive bottlenecks, and obviating the need for repeated layer stacking. In practice, we replace the fixed graph Laplacian L by a learned operator L_mu, keeping the proposed mu-ChebNet architecture lightweight while making propagation task-adaptive. Furthermore, we provide a spectral analysis demonstrating how mu modulates propagation dynamics, and empirically observe improved performance on both synthetic long-range reasoning tasks and real-world graph benchmarks. The learned weight function is not only interpretable, but also offers a lightweight alternative to attention and rewiring for adaptive graph propagation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18141
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Geometry-Induced Diffusion on Graphs: A Learnable Weighted Laplacian for Spectral GNNs
Zosso, Mia
Hariri, Ali
Kawasaki-Borruat, Victor
Berlureau, Pierre-Gabriel
Vandergheynst, Pierre
Machine Learning
Long-range graph tasks are challenging for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): global mechanisms such as attention or rewiring schemes can be computationally expensive, while deep local propagation is prone to vanishing gradients, oversmoothing, and oversquashing. The introduced mu-ChebNet architecture is a simple spectral GNN that learns a node-wise weight function mu before applying ChebNet-style filters. The learned weighting mu induces a modified graph Laplacian which effectively changes the propagation geometry without altering the graph topology. This task-dependent geometry promotes preferred routes for information propagation, thereby helping long-range signals avoid highly contractive bottlenecks, and obviating the need for repeated layer stacking. In practice, we replace the fixed graph Laplacian L by a learned operator L_mu, keeping the proposed mu-ChebNet architecture lightweight while making propagation task-adaptive. Furthermore, we provide a spectral analysis demonstrating how mu modulates propagation dynamics, and empirically observe improved performance on both synthetic long-range reasoning tasks and real-world graph benchmarks. The learned weight function is not only interpretable, but also offers a lightweight alternative to attention and rewiring for adaptive graph propagation.
title Geometry-Induced Diffusion on Graphs: A Learnable Weighted Laplacian for Spectral GNNs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18141