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Poster

Extending the Design Space of Graph Neural Networks by Rethinking Folklore Weisfeiler-Lehman

Jiarui Feng · Lecheng Kong · Hao Liu · Dacheng Tao · Fuhai Li · Muhan Zhang · Yixin Chen

Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 (level 1) #631

Abstract: Message passing neural networks (MPNNs) have emerged as the most popular framework of graph neural networks (GNNs) in recent years. However, their expressive power is limited by the 1-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) test. Some works are inspired by k-WL/FWL (Folklore WL) and design the corresponding neural versions. Despite the high expressive power, there are serious limitations in this line of research. In particular, (1) k-WL/FWL requires at least O(nk) space complexity, which is impractical for large graphs even when k=3; (2) The design space of k-WL/FWL is rigid, with the only adjustable hyper-parameter being k. To tackle the first limitation, we propose an extension, (k,t)-FWL. We theoretically prove that even if we fix the space complexity to O(nk) (for any k2) in (k,t)-FWL, we can construct an expressiveness hierarchy up to solving the graph isomorphism problem. To tackle the second problem, we propose k-FWL+, which considers any equivariant set as neighbors instead of all nodes, thereby greatly expanding the design space of k-FWL. Combining these two modifications results in a flexible and powerful framework (k,t)-FWL+. We demonstrate (k,t)-FWL+ can implement most existing models with matching expressiveness. We then introduce an instance of (k,t)-FWL+ called Neighborhood2-FWL (N2-FWL), which is practically and theoretically sound. We prove that N2-FWL is no less powerful than 3-WL, and can encode many substructures while only requiring O(n2) space. Finally, we design its neural version named **N2-GNN** and evaluate its performance on various tasks. N2-GNN achieves record-breaking results on ZINC-Subset (**0.059**), outperforming previous SOTA results by 10.6\%. Moreover, N2-GNN achieves new SOTA results on the BREC dataset (**71.8\%**) among all existing high-expressive GNN methods.

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