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Related papers: Revisiting Over-smoothing in Deep GCNs

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Node features of graph neural networks (GNNs) tend to become more similar with the increase of the network depth. This effect is known as over-smoothing, which we axiomatically define as the exponential convergence of suitable similarity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 T. Konstantin Rusch , Michael M. Bronstein , Siddhartha Mishra

In recent years, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have gained popularity for their exceptional ability to process graph-structured data. Existing GCN-based approaches typically employ a shallow model architecture due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Jielong Lu , Zhihao Wu , Zhiling Cai , Yueyang Pi , Shiping Wang

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) suffer from performance degradation when models go deeper. However, earlier works only attributed the performance degeneration to over-smoothing. In this paper, we conduct theoretical and experimental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Weigang Lu , Yibing Zhan , Binbin Lin , Ziyu Guan , Liu Liu , Baosheng Yu , Wei Zhao , Yaming Yang , Dacheng Tao

Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) refers to the phenomenon where increasing network depth leads to homogeneous node representations. While previous work has established that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) exponentially lose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Xinyi Wu , Amir Ajorlou , Zihui Wu , Ali Jadbabaie

Owing to the remarkable capability of extracting effective graph embeddings, graph convolutional network (GCN) and its variants have been successfully applied to a broad range of tasks, such as node classification, link prediction, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Ronghang Zhu , Zhiqiang Tao , Yaliang Li , Sheng Li

Recent years have witnessed remarkable success achieved by graph neural networks (GNNs) in many real-world applications such as recommendation and drug discovery. Despite the success, oversmoothing has been identified as one of the key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Wei Jin , Xiaorui Liu , Yao Ma , Charu Aggarwal , Jiliang Tang

Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn the representation of a node by aggregating its neighbors, have become an effective computational tool in downstream applications. Over-smoothing is one of the key issues which limit the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Kaixiong Zhou , Xiao Huang , Yuening Li , Daochen Zha , Rui Chen , Xia Hu

Many interesting problems in machine learning are being revisited with new deep learning tools. For graph-based semisupervised learning, a recent important development is graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which nicely integrate local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-24 Qimai Li , Zhichao Han , Xiao-Ming Wu

It is known that the current graph neural networks (GNNs) are difficult to make themselves deep due to the problem known as over-smoothing. Multi-scale GNNs are a promising approach for mitigating the over-smoothing problem. However, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Kenta Oono , Taiji Suzuki

Graph neural networks have shown significant success in the field of graph representation learning. Graph convolutions perform neighborhood aggregation and represent one of the most important graph operations. Nevertheless, one layer of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Meng Liu , Hongyang Gao , Shuiwang Ji

Despite the wide application of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), one major limitation is that it does not benefit from the increasing depth and suffers from the oversmoothing problem. In this work, we first characterize this phenomenon…

Oversmoothing has been claimed as a primary bottleneck for multi-layered graph neural networks (GNNs). Multiple analyses have examined how and why oversmoothing occurs. However, none of the prior work addressed how optimization is performed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 MoonJeong Park , Dongwoo Kim

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed to process data associated with graphs. They are finding an increasing range of applications; however, as with other modern machine learning techniques, their theoretical understanding is limited.…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-02-23 O. Duranthon , L. Zdeborová

Oversmoothing is a common challenge in learning graph neural networks (GNN), where, as layers increase, embedding features learned from GNNs quickly become similar or indistinguishable, making them incapable of differentiating network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Yufei Jin , Xingquan Zhu

The self-attention mechanism in transformers and the message-passing mechanism in graph neural networks are repeatedly applied within deep learning architectures. We show that this application inevitably leads to oversmoothing, i.e., to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Ameen Ali , Tomer Galanti , Lior Wolf

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved a lot of success with graph-structured data. However, it is observed that the performance of GNNs does not improve (or even worsen) as the number of layers increases. This effect has known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Yeskendir Koishekenov

Geometric deep learning has made great strides towards generalizing the design of structure-aware neural networks from traditional domains to non-Euclidean ones, giving rise to graph neural networks (GNN) that can be applied to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-28 Frederik Wenkel , Yimeng Min , Matthew Hirn , Michael Perlmutter , Guy Wolf

Over-smoothing is a severe problem which limits the depth of Graph Convolutional Networks. This article gives a comprehensive analysis of the mechanism behind Graph Convolutional Networks and the over-smoothing effect. The article proposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Fang Sun

The performance of graph neural nets (GNNs) is known to gradually decrease with increasing number of layers. This decay is partly attributed to oversmoothing, where repeated graph convolutions eventually make node embeddings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Lingxiao Zhao , Leman Akoglu

In this work we investigate an observation made by Kipf \& Welling, who suggested that untrained GCNs can generate meaningful node embeddings. In particular, we investigate the effect of training only a single layer of a GCN, while keeping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Dimitrios Kelesis , Dimitris Fotakis , Georgios Paliouras