Taming Gradient Oversmoothing and Expansion in Graph Neural Networks
Oversmoothing has been claimed as a primary bottleneck for multi-layered graph neural networks (GNNs). Multiple analyses have examined how and why oversmoothing occurs. However, none of the prior work addressed how optimization is performed under the oversmoothing regime. In this work, we show the presence of $\textit{gradient oversmoothing}$ preventing optimization during training. We further analyze that GNNs with residual connections, a well-known solution to help gradient flow in deep architecture, introduce $\textit{gradient expansion}$, a phenomenon of the gradient explosion in diverse directions. Therefore, adding residual connections cannot be a solution for making a GNN deep. Our analysis reveals that constraining the Lipschitz bound of each layer can neutralize the gradient expansion. To this end, we provide a simple yet effective normalization method to prevent the gradient expansion. An empirical study shows that the residual GNNs with hundreds of layers can be efficiently trained with the proposed normalization without compromising performance. Additional studies show that the empirical observations corroborate our theoretical analysis.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Backward Oversmoothing: why is it hard to train deep Graph Neural Networks?
Oversmoothing has long been identified as a major limitation of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): input node features are smoothed at each layer and converge to a non-informative representation, if the weights of the GNN are…
SSFG: Stochastically Scaling Features and Gradients for Regularizing Graph Convolutional Networks
Graph convolutional networks have been successfully applied in various graph-based tasks. In a typical graph convolutional layer, node features are updated by aggregating neighborhood information. Repeatedly applying gra…
Graph LearningFoSR: First-order spectral rewiring for addressing oversquashing in GNNs
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are able to leverage the structure of graph data by passing messages along the edges of the graph. While this allows GNNs to learn features depending on the graph structure, for certain graph…
Graph ClassificationThe Oversmoothing Fallacy: A Misguided Narrative in GNN Research
Oversmoothing has been recognized as a main obstacle to building deep Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), limiting the performance. This position paper argues that the influence of oversmoothing has been overstated and advocat…
MisconceptionsReducing Oversmoothing through Informed Weight Initialization in Graph Neural Networks
In this work, we generalize the ideas of Kaiming initialization to Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and propose a new scheme (G-Init) that reduces oversmoothing, leading to very good results in node and graph classification …
Graph Classification