Node Classification Beyond Homophily: Towards a General Solution

Zhe Xu, Yuzhong Chen, Qinghai Zhou, Yuhang Wu, Menghai Pan, Hao Yang, Hanghang Tong

Keywords: node classification, structure learning, homophily, heterophily

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become core building blocks behind a myriad of graph learning tasks. The vast majority of the existing GNNs are built upon, either implicitly or explicitly, the homophily assumption, which is not always true and could heavily degrade the performance of learning tasks. In response, GNNs tailored for heterophilic graphs have been developed. However, most of the existing works are designed for the specific GNN models to address heterophily, which lacks generality. In this paper, we study the problem from the structure learning perspective and propose a family of general solutions named ALT. It can work hand in hand with most of the existing GNNs to decently handle graphs with either low or high homophily. The core of our method is learning to (1) decompose a given graph into two components, (2) extract complementary graph signals from these two components, and (3) adaptively merge the graph signals for node classification. Moreover, analysis based on graph signal processing shows that our framework can empower a broad range of existing GNNs to have adaptive filter characteristics and further modulate the input graph signals, which is critical for handling complex homophilic/heterophilic patterns. The proposed ALT brings significant and consistent performance improvement in node classification for a wide range of GNNs over a variety of real-world datasets.

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