Exponentially Improving the Complexity of Simulating the Weisfeiler-Lehman Test with Graph Neural Networks
Main Conference Track
Authors: Anders Aamand, Justin Chen, Piotr Indyk, Shyam Narayanan, Ronitt Rubinfeld, Nicholas Schiefer, Sandeep Silwal, Tal Wagner

Recent work shows that the expressive power of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in distinguishing non-isomorphic graphs is exactly the same as that of the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) graph test. In particular, they show that the WL test can be simulated by GNNs. However, those simulations involve neural networks for the “combine” function of size polynomial or even exponential in the number of graph nodes $n$, as well as feature vectors of length linear in $n$. We present an improved simulation of the WL test on GNNs with {\em exponentially} lower complexity. In particular,  the neural network implementing the  combine function  in each node has only $\mathrm{polylog}(n)$ parameters, and the feature vectors exchanged by the nodes of GNN consists of only $O(\log n)$ bits. We also give logarithmic lower bounds for the feature vector length and the size of the neural networks, showing the (near)-optimality of our construction.