Is Distance Matrix Enough for Geometric Deep Learning?
Main Conference Track
Authors: Zian Li, Xiyuan Wang, Yinan Huang, Muhan Zhang

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are often used for tasks involving the 3D geometry of a given graph, such as molecular dynamics simulation. While incorporating Euclidean distance into Message Passing Neural Networks (referred to as Vanilla DisGNN) is a straightforward way to learn the geometry, it has been demonstrated that Vanilla DisGNN is geometrically incomplete. In this work, we first construct families of novel and symmetric geometric graphs that Vanilla DisGNN cannot distinguish even when considering all-pair distances, which greatly expands the existing counterexample families. Our counterexamples show the inherent limitation of Vanilla DisGNN to capture symmetric geometric structures. We then propose $k$-DisGNNs, which can effectively exploit the rich geometry contained in the distance matrix. We demonstrate the high expressive power of $k$-DisGNNs from three perspectives: 1. They can learn high-order geometric information that cannot be captured by Vanilla DisGNN. 2. They can unify some existing well-designed geometric models. 3. They are universal function approximators from geometric graphs to scalars (when $k\geq 2$) and vectors (when $k\geq 3$). Most importantly, we establish a connection between geometric deep learning (GDL) and traditional graph representation learning (GRL), showing that those highly expressive GNN models originally designed for GRL can also be applied to GDL with impressive performance, and that existing complicated, equivariant models are not the only solution. Experiments verify our theory. Our $k$-DisGNNs achieve many new state-of-the-art results on MD17.