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Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are known to suffer from performance degradation as the number of layers increases, which is usually attributed to over-smoothing. Despite the apparent consensus, we observe that there exists a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Weilin Cong , Morteza Ramezani , Mehrdad Mahdavi

In this paper, we study the factors that contribute to the effect of oversmoothing in deep Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Specifically, our analysis is based on a new metric (Mean Average Squared Distance - $MASED$) to quantify the extent of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Dimitrios Kelesis , Dimitris Fotakis , Georgios Paliouras

Implicit Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant success in addressing graph learning problems recently. However, poorly designed implicit GNN layers may have limited adaptability to learn graph metrics, experience…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Guoji Fu , Mohammed Haroon Dupty , Yanfei Dong , Lee Wee Sun

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in various graph mining tasks.However, drastic performance degradation is always observed when a GNN is stacked with many layers. As a result, most GNNs only have shallow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Wentao Zhang , Zeang Sheng , Ziqi Yin , Yuezihan Jiang , Yikuan Xia , Jun Gao , Zhi Yang , Bin Cui

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used in domains like social networks and biological systems. However, the locality assumption of GNNs, which limits information exchange to neighboring nodes, hampers their ability to capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Tingting Dan , Jiaqi Ding , Ziquan Wei , Shahar Z Kovalsky , Minjeong Kim , Won Hwa Kim , Guorong Wu

Graph neural networks (GNNs) integrate deep architectures and topological structure modeling in an effective way. However, the performance of existing GNNs would decrease significantly when they stack many layers, because of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Kaixiong Zhou , Xiao Huang , Daochen Zha , Rui Chen , Li Li , Soo-Hyun Choi , Xia Hu

Graph Neural Network (GNN) achieves great success for node-level and graph-level tasks via encoding meaningful topological structures of networks in various domains, ranging from social to biological networks. However, repeated aggregation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tanvir Hossain , Khaled Mohammed Saifuddin , Muhammad Ifte Khairul Islam , Farhan Tanvir , Esra Akbas

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have achieved promising performance on various graph-based tasks. However they suffer from over-smoothing when stacking more layers. In this paper, we present a quantitative study on this observation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-28 Hongwei Zhang , Tijin Yan , Zenjun Xie , Yuanqing Xia , Yuan Zhang

The relationship between Layer Normalization (LN) placement and the oversmoothing phenomenon remains underexplored. We identify a critical dilemma: Pre-LN architectures avoid oversmoothing but suffer from the curse of depth, while Post-LN…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Weiqi Guan , Junlin He

Numerous recent research on graph neural networks (GNNs) has focused on formulating GNN architectures as an optimization problem with the smoothness assumption. However, in node classification tasks, the smoothing effect induced by GNNs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Jiayu Zhai , Lequan Lin , Dai Shi , Junbin Gao

Oversmoothing is a common phenomenon observed in graph neural networks (GNNs), in which an increase in the network depth leads to a deterioration in their performance. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) is emerging as a promising way of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Jintang Li , Wangbin Sun , Ruofan Wu , Yuchang Zhu , Liang Chen , Zibin Zheng

Increasing the depth of GCN, which is expected to permit more expressivity, is shown to incur performance detriment especially on node classification. The main cause of this lies in over-smoothing. The over-smoothing issue drives the output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Wenbing Huang , Yu Rong , Tingyang Xu , Fuchun Sun , Junzhou Huang

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in many graph mining tasks. However, scaling them to large graphs is challenging due to the high computational and storage costs of repeated feature propagation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Yuxuan Liang , Wentao Zhang , Zeang Sheng , Ling Yang , Quanqing Xu , Jiawei Jiang , Yunhai Tong , Bin Cui

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

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

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in graph data analysis due to their powerful representation capabilities. However, as the network depth increases, the issue of over-smoothing becomes more severe, causing node…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Kaichen Ouyang

Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) poses a significant challenge as network depth increases, leading to homogenized node representations and a loss of expressiveness. In this work, we approach the oversmoothing problem from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Biswadeep Chakraborty , Harshit Kumar , Saibal Mukhopadhyay

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

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

Oversmoothing is a fundamental challenge in graph neural networks (GNNs): as the number of layers increases, node embeddings become increasingly similar, and model performance drops sharply. Traditionally, oversmoothing has been quantified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Kaicheng Zhang , Piero Deidda , Desmond Higham , Francesco Tudisco