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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

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…

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

A graph convolutional network (GCN) employs a graph filtering kernel tailored for data with irregular structures. However, simply stacking more GCN layers does not improve performance; instead, the output converges to an uninformative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jin Zeng , Yang Liu , Gene Cheung , Wei Hu

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 Network (GNN) resembles the diffusion process, leading to the over-smoothing of learned representations when stacking many layers. Hence, the reverse process of message passing can produce the distinguishable node…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2024-06-12 MoonJeong Park , Jaeseung Heo , Dongwoo Kim

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) is a pioneering model for graph-based semi-supervised learning. However, GCN does not perform well on sparsely-labeled graphs. Its two-layer version cannot effectively propagate the label information to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Wei Ye , Zexi Huang , Yunqi Hong , Ambuj Singh

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) hold a key position in machine learning on graphs, but they struggle with unintended behaviors, such as over-smoothing and over-squashing, due to irregular data structures. The observation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Junhyun Lee , Veronika Thost , Bumsoo Kim , Jaewoo Kang , Tengfei Ma

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

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

Residual connections and normalization layers have become standard design choices for graph neural networks (GNNs), and were proposed as solutions to the mitigate the oversmoothing problem in GNNs. However, how exactly these methods help…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Michael Scholkemper , Xinyi Wu , Ali Jadbabaie , Michael T. Schaub

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

Recently, motivated by real applications, a major research direction in graph neural networks (GNNs) is to explore deeper structures. For instance, the graph connectivity is not always consistent with the label distribution (e.g., the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Lecheng Zheng , Dongqi Fu , Ross Maciejewski , Jingrui He

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

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have succeeded in various computer science applications, yet deep GNNs underperform their shallow counterparts despite deep learning's success in other domains. Over-smoothing and over-squashing are key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-14 Jhony H. Giraldo , Konstantinos Skianis , Thierry Bouwmans , Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

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

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) is the building block of graph foundation models, but fundamentally suffer from oversmoothing and oversquashing. There has recently been a surge of interest in fixing both issues. Existing efforts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Li Sun , Zhenhao Huang , Ming Zhang , Philip S. Yu

\emph{Over-fitting} and \emph{over-smoothing} are two main obstacles of developing deep Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) for node classification. In particular, over-fitting weakens the generalization ability on small dataset, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-13 Yu Rong , Wenbing Huang , Tingyang Xu , Junzhou Huang

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 Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited in their propagation operators. In many cases, these operators often contain non-negative elements only and are shared across channels, limiting the expressiveness of GNNs. Moreover, some GNNs suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Moshe Eliasof , Lars Ruthotto , Eran Treister