Rethinking Multi-Label Node Classification: Do Tuned Classic GNNs Suffice?

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Hauptverfasser: Xiao, Yuxuan, Zhang, Shengzhong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Xiao, Yuxuan
Zhang, Shengzhong
author_facet Xiao, Yuxuan
Zhang, Shengzhong
contents Multi-label node classification (MLNC) has recently been addressed by increasingly complex label-aware designs that explicitly model node-label interactions and inter-label dependencies.However, it remains unclear whether the advantages of these methods truly stem from their specialized designs, or simply from insufficiently optimized baselines. In this paper, we revisit MLNC from a strong-baseline perspective and investigate whether carefully tuned classic full-graph GNNs can already serve as strong solutions to this task. We systematically study several representative backbones, including GCN, SSGConv, and GCNII, and optimize them using standard yet effective techniques such as normalization, dropout, and residual connections. Experiments on five representative benchmark datasets show that our tuned baselines outperform representative specialized methods on four datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance in multiple settings. These results indicate that careful tuning of classic backbones is a highly influential but often overlooked factor in MLNC, and highlight the need for more rigorous strong-baseline evaluation in future research on multi-label graph learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01403
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Multi-Label Node Classification: Do Tuned Classic GNNs Suffice?
Xiao, Yuxuan
Zhang, Shengzhong
Machine Learning
Multi-label node classification (MLNC) has recently been addressed by increasingly complex label-aware designs that explicitly model node-label interactions and inter-label dependencies.However, it remains unclear whether the advantages of these methods truly stem from their specialized designs, or simply from insufficiently optimized baselines. In this paper, we revisit MLNC from a strong-baseline perspective and investigate whether carefully tuned classic full-graph GNNs can already serve as strong solutions to this task. We systematically study several representative backbones, including GCN, SSGConv, and GCNII, and optimize them using standard yet effective techniques such as normalization, dropout, and residual connections. Experiments on five representative benchmark datasets show that our tuned baselines outperform representative specialized methods on four datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance in multiple settings. These results indicate that careful tuning of classic backbones is a highly influential but often overlooked factor in MLNC, and highlight the need for more rigorous strong-baseline evaluation in future research on multi-label graph learning.
title Rethinking Multi-Label Node Classification: Do Tuned Classic GNNs Suffice?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01403