Finding Global Homophily in Graph Neural Networks When Meeting Heterophily
Abstract
We investigate graph neural networks on graphs with heterophily. Some existing methods amplify a node's neighborhood with multi-hop neighbors to include more nodes with homophily. However, it is a significant challenge to set personalized neighborhood sizes for different nodes. Further, for other homophilous nodes excluded in the neighborhood, they are ignored for information aggregation. To address these problems, we propose two models GloGNN and GloGNN++, which generate a node's embedding by aggregating information from global nodes in the graph. In each layer, both models learn a coefficient matrix to capture the correlations between nodes, based on which neighborhood aggregation is performed. The coefficient matrix allows signed values and is derived from an optimization problem that has a closed-form solution. We further accelerate neighborhood aggregation and derive a linear time complexity. We theoretically explain the models' effectiveness by proving that both the coefficient matrix and the generated node embedding matrix have the desired grouping effect. We conduct extensive experiments to compare our models against 11 other competitors on 15 benchmark datasets in a wide range of domains, scales and graph heterophilies. Experimental results show that our methods achieve superior performance and are also very efficient.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 4 datasets
Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).
Heterophilic Graphs
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | P^2GNN | 0.9672
±0.0147 | |
| 2 | DoG | 0.9660
±0.0210 | |
| 3 | GPF-plus | 0.9583
±0.0419 | |
| 34 | MLP | 0.9230
±0.0070 | |
| 53 | GraphSAGE | 0.9000
±0.0365 | |
| 141 | GloGNN | 0.8432 | prev best: Label-Wise Graph Convolutional Network for Heterophilic Graphs (2021) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 309 | CPGNN | 0.7568
±0.0512 best reported | best at pub: GBK-GNN: Gated Bi-Kernel Graph Neural Networks for Modeling Both Homophily and Heterophily (WWW 2021) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 559 | H_A | 0.5622 | This paper |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | P^2GNN | 0.9541
±0.0272 | |
| 2 | ACM-GCN | 0.9480
±0.0380 | |
| 3 | RF-GCN | 0.9429 | |
| 24 | MLP | 0.9136
±0.0070 | |
| 74 | GloGNN | 0.8595
±0.0510 best reported | best today: Aggregation-aware MLP: An Unsupervised Approach for Graph Message-passing (2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 138 | SAGE | 0.8269 | |
| 504 | H_A | 0.4838 | This paper |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DiGGR | 0.4535
±0.0353 | |
| 2 | TRIGON | 0.4402
±0.0028 | |
| 3 | DoG | 0.4320
±0.0120 | |
| 42 | MLP | 0.4026
±0.0108 | |
| 58 | GloGNN | 0.3959
±0.0029 best reported | |
| 68 | GraphSAGE | 0.3899
±0.0085 | |
| 437 | H_A | 0.2473 | This paper |
LINKX Benchmarks
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DC-GNN | 0.8669
±0.0022 | |
| 2 | M2M-GNN | 0.8594
±0.0040 | |
| 3 | GloGNN | 0.8574
±0.0042 best reported | best today: Differentiable Cluster Graph Neural Network (2024) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 29 | GIN | 0.8268
±0.0032 | |
| 33 | H_A | 0.8225 | This paper |
| 51 | MLP | 0.7534
±0.0064 |
