Label-Wise Graph Convolutional Network for Heterophilic Graphs

Enyan Dai, Shijie Zhou, Zhimeng Guo, Suhang Wang

Main figure for Label-Wise Graph Convolutional Network for Heterophilic Graphs

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in modeling graphs for various applications. However, most existing GNNs assume the graphs exhibit strong homophily in node labels, i.e., nodes with similar labels are connected in the graphs. They fail to generalize to heterophilic graphs where linked nodes may have dissimilar labels and attributes. Therefore, we investigate a novel framework that performs well on graphs with either homophily or heterophily. Specifically, we propose a label-wise message passing mechanism to avoid the negative effects caused by aggregating dissimilar node representations and preserve the heterophilic contexts for representation learning. We further propose a bi-level optimization method to automatically select the model for graphs with homophily/heterophily. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework for node classification on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs.

Proposed method: GCNs

Benchmark Results

Tested on 3 datasets 1 baseline value reported too low

Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).

Heterophilic Graphs

#ModelAccuracy ↑Paper
1
P^2GNN
0.9672 ±0.0147
2
DoG
0.9660 ±0.0210
3
GPF-plus
0.9583 ±0.0419
28
GPRGNN
actual #28 vs paper #289 261 places worse
0.7700 ±0.0640
actual #28 vs paper #289 261 places worse
paper 0.7700 ±0.0640
paper 0.7700 ±0.0640 Δ at pub 0.1473 Δ today 0.1595
34
MLP
actual #34 vs paper #274 240 places worse
0.9230 ±0.0070
best reported
actual #34 vs paper #274 240 places worse
paper 0.7810 ±0.0600
paper 0.7810 ±0.0600 Δ at pub 0.0520 Δ today 0.1420
40
H2GCN
actual #40 vs paper #173 133 places worse
0.9189 ±0.0393
best reported
actual #40 vs paper #173 133 places worse
paper 0.8370 ±0.0600

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.8370 ±0.0600 Δ at pub 0.0116 Δ today 0.0819
53
GraphSAGE
0.9000 ±0.0365
61
FAGCN
actual #61 vs paper #252 191 places worse
0.8961 ±0.0152
best reported
actual #61 vs paper #252 191 places worse
paper 0.7950 ±0.0480
paper 0.7950 ±0.0480 Δ today 0.1011
70
GCNII
actual #70 vs paper #407 337 places worse
0.8918 ±0.0443
best reported
actual #70 vs paper #407 337 places worse
paper 0.6860 ±0.0980
paper 0.6860 ±0.0980 Δ at pub 0.0686 Δ today 0.2058
117
GCNs
0.8620 ±0.0580
This paper
130
ASGC
0.8590 ±0.0470
This paper
141
GloGNN
actual #141 vs paper #182 41 places worse
0.8524 ±0.0490
best reported
actual #141 vs paper #182 41 places worse
paper 0.8320 ±0.0430

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.8320 ±0.0430 Δ today 0.0204
144
BM-GCN
actual #144 vs paper #207 63 places worse
0.8513 ±0.0464
best reported
actual #144 vs paper #207 63 places worse
paper 0.8190 ±0.0540

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.8190 ±0.0540 Δ today 0.0323
213
SimP-GCN
actual #213 vs paper #237 24 places worse
0.8160
best reported
actual #213 vs paper #237 24 places worse
paper 0.8050 ±0.0590

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.8050 ±0.0590 Δ at pub 0.0110
257
GCN
actual #257 vs paper #546 289 places worse
0.7933 ±0.0447
best reported
actual #257 vs paper #546 289 places worse
paper 0.5760 ±0.0590
best today: Graph Wave Networks (WWW 2025)
paper 0.5760 ±0.0590 Δ at pub 0.0621 Δ today 0.2173
276
MixHop
actual #276 vs paper #494 218 places worse
0.7784 ±0.0773
best reported
actual #276 vs paper #494 218 places worse
paper 0.6060 ±0.0770
best at pub: Graph Pointer Neural Networks (AAAI 2021)
paper 0.6060 ±0.0770 Δ at pub 0.1724 Δ today 0.1724
325
LINKX
0.7460 ±0.0840
This paper
490
SuperGAT
actual #490 vs paper #530 40 places worse
0.6108 ±0.0497
best reported
actual #490 vs paper #530 40 places worse
paper 0.5860 ±0.0770

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.5860 ±0.0770 Δ today 0.0248
#ModelAccuracy ↑Paper
1
P^2GNN
0.9541 ±0.0272
2
ACM-GCN
0.9480 ±0.0380
3
RF-GCN
0.9429
24
MLP
actual #24 vs paper #185 161 places worse
0.9136 ±0.0070
best reported
actual #24 vs paper #185 161 places worse
paper 0.7920 ±0.0570
paper 0.7920 ±0.0570 Δ at pub 0.0566 Δ today 0.1216
35
GCNII
actual #35 vs paper #177 142 places worse
0.8030 ±0.0530
actual #35 vs paper #177 142 places worse
paper 0.8030 ±0.0530

Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted.

paper 0.8030 ±0.0530 Δ at pub 0.0219 Δ today 0.0888
131
GCNs
0.8320 ±0.0550
This paper
138
SAGE
0.8269
170
GCN
actual #170 vs paper #414 244 places worse
0.8082 ±0.0360
best reported
actual #170 vs paper #414 244 places worse
paper 0.5730 ±0.0580
paper 0.5730 ±0.0580 Δ at pub 0.0205 Δ today 0.2352
183
MixHop
actual #183 vs paper #183
0.7950 ±0.0630
actual #183 vs paper #183
paper 0.7950 ±0.0630
prev best: Graph Pointer Neural Networks (AAAI 2021)

Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted.

paper 0.7950 ±0.0630 Δ at pub 0.0599
416
SuperGAT
0.5730 ±0.0430
This paper

LINKX Benchmarks

#ModelAccuracy ↑Paper
1
LargeScaleNet
0.6582 ±0.0036
2
S² DirGCN
0.6495 ±0.0033
3
FaberNet
0.6462 ±0.0101
13
LINKX
0.5600 ±0.0130
This paper
14
GCNs
0.5580 ±0.0020
This paper
16
GloGNN
0.5480 ±0.0030
This paper
19
MixHop
actual #19 vs paper #29 10 places worse
0.5181 ±0.0017
best reported
actual #19 vs paper #29 10 places worse
paper 0.4610 ±0.0050
23
H2GCN
0.4910 ±0.0010
This paper
26
GCNII
actual #26 vs paper #27 1 place worse
0.4721 ±0.0028
best reported
actual #26 vs paper #27 1 place worse
paper 0.4720 ±0.0030

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.4720 ±0.0030 Δ today 0.0001
31
GCN
actual #31 vs paper #31
0.4602 ±0.0026
best reported
actual #31 vs paper #31
paper 0.4600 ±0.0030

Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance.

paper 0.4600 ±0.0030 Δ today 0.0002
34
GPRGNN
0.4510 ±0.0020
This paper
44
FAGCN
0.4060 ±0.0040
This paper
49
ASGC
0.3920 ±0.0010
This paper
54
SuperGAT
0.3810 ±0.0010
This paper
56
MLP
0.3670 ±0.0020
This paper
SOTA performance (not significantly different from the best) Proposed method (this paper) Baseline / comparison (this paper) Global context (other papers) Best at pub — reported result worse than the best known when published (best reported in green) Improved at pub — later paper surpassed this result Best today — OK at publication; today's leaderboard best is elsewhere