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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) 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

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

Linearized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have attracted great attention in recent years for graph representation learning. Compared with nonlinear Graph Neural Network (GNN) models, linearized GNNs are much more time-efficient and can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Yulin Zhu , Xing Ai , Qimai Li , Xiao-Ming Wu , Kai Zhou

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) have achieved a lot of success on graph-structured data. However, it is observed that the performance of graph neural networks does not improve as the number of layers increases. This effect, known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Chen Cai , Yusu Wang

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

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

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

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

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 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 received tremendous attention due to their superiority in learning node representations. These models rely on message passing and feature transformation functions to encode the structural and feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Kai Guo , Kaixiong Zhou , Xia Hu , Yu Li , Yi Chang , Xin Wang

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

While graph neural networks (GNNs) have allowed researchers to successfully apply neural networks to non-Euclidean domains, deep GNNs often exhibit lower predictive performance than their shallow counterparts. This phenomena has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Keqin Wang , Yulong Yang , Ishan Saha , Christine Allen-Blanchette

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 Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are powerful for processing graph-structured data and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in several tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. However, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Langzhang Liang , Cuiyun Gao , Shiyi Chen , Shishi Duan , Yu pan , Junjin Zheng , Lei Wang , Zenglin Xu

It has been discovered that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) encounter a remarkable drop in performance when multiple layers are piled up. The main factor that accounts for why deep GCNs fail lies in over-smoothing, which isolates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Jiaqi Han , Wenbing Huang , Yu Rong , Tingyang Xu , Fuchun Sun , Junzhou Huang

The performance of GNNs degrades as they become deeper due to the over-smoothing. Among all the attempts to prevent over-smoothing, residual connection is one of the promising methods due to its simplicity. However, recent studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Jie Chen , Weiqi Liu , Zhizhong Huang , Junbin Gao , Junping Zhang , Jian Pu