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Title: On Graph Neural Networks versus Graph-Augmented MLPs
From the perspective of expressive power, this work compares multi-layer Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with a simplified alternative thatwe call Graph-Augmented Multi-Layer Perceptrons (GA-MLPs), which first augments node features with certain multi-hop operators on the graph and then applies an MLP in a node-wise fashion. From the perspective of graph isomorphism testing,we showboth theoretically and numerically that GA-MLPs with suitable operators can distinguish almost all non-isomorphic graphs, just like the Weifeiler-Lehman (WL) test. However, by viewing them as node-level functions and examining the equivalence classes they induce on rooted graphs, we prove a separation in expressive power between GA-MLPs and GNNs that grows exponentially in depth. In particular, unlike GNNs, GA-MLPs are unable to count the number of attributed walks. We also demonstrate via community detection experiments that GA-MLPs can be limited by their choice of operator family, as compared to GNNs with higher flexibility in learning.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1816753 1845360
NSF-PAR ID:
10299539
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Learning Representations
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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    Supplementary information

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