Weisfeiler-Leman Is Incomplete on Simple Spectrum Graphs, so Canonicalize Them
Abstract
Graphs with a simple spectrum admit cubic-time isomorphism testing, yet we prove that for every natural number , the -Weisfeiler-Leman (-WL) test cannot distinguish all non-isomorphic graphs with a simple spectrum. As the WL hierarchy upper-bounds the distinguishing power of widely-used Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), this incompleteness applies to all such GNNs, ruling out completeness for every -WL-aligned GNN family. To close this gap, we introduce PRiSM (Partition, Refine, Solve, Match), the first provably complete canonicalization of simple-spectrum eigendecompositions. PRiSM obtains the completeness guarantee that prior canonicalizations provably lack, and resolves the open problem of achieving complete expressivity on simple-spectrum graphs. When composed with DeepSets or a Transformer, PRiSM achieves universal approximation on simple-spectrum graphs, justifying the use of canonicalized Laplacian positional encodings. Empirically, PRiSM performs comparably to or outperforms existing spectral canonicalizations on graph regression, classification, and expressivity
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.23446,
title = {Weisfeiler-Leman Is Incomplete on Simple Spectrum Graphs, so Canonicalize Them},
author = {Snir Hordan and Nadav Dym and Tim Seppelt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23446},
year = {2026}
}