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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

\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

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

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

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

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

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

Over-smoothing and over-squashing have been extensively studied in the literature on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over the past years. We challenge this prevailing focus in GNN research, arguing that these phenomena are less critical for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-13 Niklas Kormann , Benjamin Doerr , Johannes F. Lutzeyer

We analyze graph smoothing with \emph{mean aggregation}, where each node successively receives the average of the features of its neighbors. Indeed, it has quickly been observed that Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generally follow some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Nicolas Keriven

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

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…

This paper presents an analytical study of the oversmoothing issue in diffusion-based Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Generalizing beyond extant approaches grounded in random walk analysis or particle systems, we approach this problem through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Weichen Zhao , Chenguang Wang , Xinyan Wang , Congying Han , Tiande Guo , Tianshu Yu

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) learn node representations through iterative network-based message-passing. While powerful, deep GNNs suffer from oversmoothing, where node features converge to a homogeneous, non-informative state. We re-frame…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Erkan Turan , Gaspard Abel , Maysam Behmanesh , Emery Pierson , Maks Ovsjanikov

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suffer from over-smoothing in deep architectures and expressiveness bounded by the 1-Weisfeiler-Leman (1-WL) test. We adapt Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (\mhc)~\citep{xie2025mhc}, recently proposed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Subhankar Mishra

Current Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suffer from the over-smoothing problem, which results in indistinguishable node representations and low model performance with more GNN layers. Many methods have been put forward to tackle this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Xinshun Feng , Herun Wan , Shangbin Feng , Hongrui Wang , Jun Zhou , Qinghua Zheng , Minnan Luo

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a cornerstone of deep learning, with most existing methods rooted in graph signal processing and diffusion equations to model message passing. However, these approaches inherently suffer from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zexing Zhao , Guangsi Shi , Yu Gong , Tianyu Wang , Shirui Pan , Hongye Cheng , Yuxiao Li

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

Graph Neural Networks are powerful models for learning from graph-structured data, yet their effectiveness is often limited by two critical challenges: over-squashing, where information from distant nodes is excessively compressed, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Hugo Attali , Nathalie Pernelle , Davide Buscaldi , Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Graph Neural Networks are powerful models for learning from graph-structured data, yet their effectiveness is often limited by two critical challenges: over-squashing, where information from distant nodes is excessively compressed, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Hugo Attali , Davide Buscaldi , Nathalie Pernelle , Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Graph neural networks (GNNs) manifest pathologies including over-smoothing and limited discriminating power as a result of suboptimally expressive aggregating mechanisms. We herein present a unifying framework for stochastic aggregation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-01 Yuanqing Wang , Theofanis Karaletsos