Diverse Message Passing for Attribute with Heterophily
Datasets and Benchmarks Track
Authors: Liang Yang, Mengzhe Li, Liyang Liu, bingxin niu, Chuan Wang, Xiaochun Cao, Yuanfang Guo

Most of the existing GNNs can be modeled via the Uniform Message Passing framework. This framework considers all the attributes of each node in its entirety, shares the uniform propagation weights along each edge,  and focuses on the uniform weight learning. The design of this framework possesses two prerequisites, the simplification of homophily and heterophily to the node-level property and the ignorance of attribute differences. Unfortunately, different attributes possess diverse characteristics. In this paper, the network homophily rate defined with  respect to the node labels is extended to attribute homophily rate by taking the attributes as weak labels. Based on this attribute homophily rate, we propose a Diverse Message Passing (DMP) framework, which specifies every attribute propagation weight on each edge. Besides, we propose two specific strategies to significantly reduce the computational complexity of DMP to prevent the overfitting issue.  By investigating the spectral characteristics, existing spectral GNNs are actually equivalent to a degenerated version of DMP.  From the perspective of numerical optimization, we provide a theoretical analysis to demonstrate DMP's powerful representation ability and the ability of alleviating the over-smoothing issue.  Evaluations on various  real networks demonstrate the superiority of our DMP on  handling the networks with heterophily  and alleviating the over-smoothing issue, compared to the existing state-of-the-arts.