Polarized Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

Despite the recent success of Message-passing Graph Neural Networks (MP-GNNs), the strong inductive bias of homophily limits their ability to generalize to heterophilic graphs and leads to the over-smoothing problem. Most existing works attempt to mitigate this issue in the spirit of emphasizing the contribution from similar neighbors and reducing those from dissimilar ones when performing aggregation, where the dissimilarities are utilized passively and their positive effects are ignored, leading to suboptimal performances. Inspired by the idea of attitude polarization in social psychology, that people tend to be more extreme when exposed to an opposite opinion, we propose Polarized Graph Neural Network (Polar-GNN). Specifically, pairwise similarities and dissimilarities of nodes are firstly modeled with node features and topological structure information. And specially, we assign negative weights for those dissimilar ones. Then nodes aggregate the messages on a hyper-sphere through a polarization operation, which effectively exploits both similarities and dissimilarities. Furthermore, we theoretically demonstrate the validity of the proposed operation. Lastly, an elaborately designed loss function is introduced for the hyper-spherical embedding space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our model.