Is Heterophily A Real Nightmare For Graph Neural Networks on Performing Node Classification?

Sitao Luan, Chenqing Hua, Qincheng Lu, Jiaqi Zhu, Harry Zhao, Shuyuan Zhang, Xiao-Wen Chang, Doina Precup

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, Heterophily, Filterbank, Adaptive Channel Mixing

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) extend basic Neural Networks (NNs) by using the graph structures based on the relational inductive bias (homophily assumption). Though GNNs are believed to outperform NNs in real-world tasks, performance advantages of GNNs over graph-agnostic NNs seem not generally satisfactory. Heterophily has been considered as a main cause and numerous works have been put forward to address it. In this paper, we first show that not all cases of heterophily are harmful for GNNs with aggregation operation. Then, we propose new metrics based on a similarity matrix which considers the influence of both graph structure and input features on GNNs. The metrics demonstrate advantages over the commonly used homophily metrics in tests on synthetic graphs. From the metrics and the observations, we find that some cases of harmful heterophily can be addressed by diversification operation. By using this fact and knowledge of filterbanks, we propose the Adaptive Channel Mixing (ACM) framework to adaptively exploit aggregation, diversification and identity channels in each GNN layer, in order to address harmful heterophily. We validate the ACM-augmented baselines with 10 real-world node classification tasks. They consistently achieve significant performance gain and exceed the state-of-the-art GNNs on most of the tasks without incurring significant computational burden.

One-sentence Summary: This paper analyzes heterophily problems for graph neural networks and propose adaptive channel mixing framework to boost the performance of GNNs on node classification tasks.