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The expressive power of kth-order invariant graph networks

Machine Learning 2020-07-24 v1 Combinatorics Machine Learning

Abstract

The expressive power of graph neural network formalisms is commonly measured by their ability to distinguish graphs. For many formalisms, the k-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman (k-WL) graph isomorphism test is used as a yardstick. In this paper we consider the expressive power of kth-order invariant (linear) graph networks (k-IGNs). It is known that k-IGNs are expressive enough to simulate k-WL. This means that for any two graphs that can be distinguished by k-WL, one can find a k-IGN which also distinguishes those graphs. The question remains whether k-IGNs can distinguish more graphs than k-WL. This was recently shown to be false for k=2. Here, we generalise this result to arbitrary k. In other words, we show that k-IGNs are bounded in expressive power by k-WL. This implies that k-IGNs and k-WL are equally powerful in distinguishing graphs.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.12035,
  title  = {The expressive power of kth-order invariant graph networks},
  author = {Floris Geerts},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.12035},
  year   = {2020}
}

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18 pages