Language Model-Enhanced Message Passing for Heterophilic Graph Learning

Wenjun Wang, Dawei Cheng

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, Message Passing, Language Model, Heterophilic Graph

Abstract: Traditional graph neural networks (GNNs), which rely on homophily-driven message passing, struggle with heterophilic graphs where connected nodes exhibit dissimilar features and different labels. While existing methods address heterophily through graph structure refinement or adaptation of neighbor aggregation, they often overlook the semantic potential of node text, rely on suboptimal message representation for propagation and compromise performance on homophilic graphs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel language model (LM)-enhanced message passing approach for heterophilic graph leaning (LEMP4HG). Specifically, for text-attributed graphs, we employ LM to generate connection analysis with paired node texts, which are encoded and then fused with paired node textual embeddings through a gating mechanism. The synthesized messages are semantically enriched and adaptively balanced with both nodes' information, which mitigates contradictory signals when neighbor aggregation in heterophilic regions. Furthermore, we introduce an active learning strategy guided by our heuristic MVRD (Modulated Variation of Reliable Distance), selectively enhancing node pairs suffer most from message passing, reducing the cost of analysis generation and side effects on homophilic regions. Extensive experiments validate that our approach excels on heterophilic graphs and performs robustly on homophilic ones, with a simple graph convolutional network (GCN) backbone and practical budget.

Primary Area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies

Submission Number: 12227