English

Bermuda Triangles: GNNs Fail to Detect Simple Topological Structures

Machine Learning 2021-05-04 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Most graph neural network architectures work by message-passing node vector embeddings over the adjacency matrix, and it is assumed that they capture graph topology by doing that. We design two synthetic tasks, focusing purely on topological problems -- triangle detection and clique distance -- on which graph neural networks perform surprisingly badly, failing to detect those "bermuda" triangles. Datasets and their generation scripts are publicly available on github.com/FujitsuLaboratories/bermudatriangles and dataset.labs.fujitsu.com.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.00134,
  title  = {Bermuda Triangles: GNNs Fail to Detect Simple Topological Structures},
  author = {Arseny Tolmachev and Akira Sakai and Masaru Todoriki and Koji Maruhashi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.00134},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

ICLR 2021 GTRL Poster Presentation: https://openreview.net/forum?id=Vz_Nl9MSQnu

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:41:24.860Z