Coloring graph neural networks for node disambiguation
Authors: George Dasoulas, Ludovic Dos Santos, Kevin Scaman, Aladin Virmaux
Keywords: Graph neural networks, separability, node disambiguation, universal approximation, representation learning
TL;DR: This paper introduces a coloring scheme for node disambiguation in graph neural networks based on separability, proven to be a universal MPNN extension.
Abstract: In this paper, we show that a simple coloring scheme can improve, both theoretically and empirically, the expressive power of Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). More specifically, we introduce a graph neural network called Colored Local Iterative Procedure (CLIP) that uses colors to disambiguate identical node attributes, and show that this representation is a universal approximator of continuous functions on graphs with node attributes. Our method relies on separability, a key topological characteristic that allows to extend well-chosen neural networks into universal representations. Finally, we show experimentally that CLIP is capable of capturing structural characteristics that traditional MPNNs fail to distinguish, while being state-of-the-art on benchmark graph classification datasets.