Elastic Graph Neural Networks
Abstract
While many existing graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proven to perform $ _2$-based graph smoothing that enforces smoothness globally, in this work we aim to further enhance the local smoothness adaptivity of GNNs via $ _1$-based graph smoothing. As a result, we introduce a family of GNNs (Elastic GNNs) based on $ _1$ and $ _2$-based graph smoothing. In particular, we propose a novel and general message passing scheme into GNNs. This message passing algorithm is not only friendly to back-propagation training but also achieves the desired smoothing properties with a theoretical convergence guarantee. Experiments on semi-supervised learning tasks demonstrate that the proposed Elastic GNNs obtain better adaptivity on benchmark datasets and are significantly robust to graph adversarial attacks. The implementation of Elastic GNNs is available at.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 3 datasets 7 baseline values reported too low
Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).
Classic
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9703
±0.0019 | |
| 2 | GAT | 0.9669
±0.0014 best reported | best at pub: Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation (WWW 2020) |
| 3 | GAT+T | 0.9660
±0.0007 | |
| 7 | SAGE | 0.9643
±0.0027 | |
| 8 | GCN | 0.9632
±0.0008 best reported | best at pub: Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation (WWW 2020) |
| 21 | APPNP | 0.9573
±0.0012 best reported | |
| 50 | SGC | 0.9511
±0.0009 best reported | |
| 56 | GraphSAGE | 0.9090
±0.0100 | prev best: Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View (AAAI 2019) best today: A Quasi-Wasserstein Loss for Learning Graph Neural Networks (WWW 2023) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 119 | ChebNet | 0.9040
±0.0100 | prev best: Directed Graph Convolutional Network (2020) best today: LON-GNN: Spectral GNNs with Learnable Orthonormal Basis (2023) |
| 389 | ElasticGNN | 0.9130
±0.0130 | This paper |
| 390 | MLP | 0.9128
±0.0063 |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9461
±0.0017 | |
| 2 | GCN | 0.9412
±0.0008 best reported | best at pub: Learning on Attribute-Missing Graphs (2020) |
| 3 | GAT | 0.9398
±0.0022 best reported | best at pub: Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation (WWW 2020) |
| 8 | SAGE | 0.9351
±0.0006 | |
| 46 | GraphSAGE | 0.8070
±0.0170 | prev best: Directed Graph Convolutional Network (2020) best today: Can TabPFN Compete with GNNs for Node Classification via Graph Tabularization? (LoG 2025) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 58 | APPNP | 0.9093
±0.0018 best reported | best at pub: A Unified View on Graph Neural Networks as Graph Signal Denoising (2020) |
| 82 | SGC | 0.9022
±0.0021 best reported | |
| 216 | ChebNet | 0.8100
±0.0200 | prev best: Directed Graph Convolutional Network (2020) best today: Node-oriented Spectral Filtering for Graph Neural Networks (2022) |
| 320 | MLP | 0.8463 | |
| 424 | ElasticGNN | 0.8070
±0.0180 | This paper |
