Graph Elimination Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely applied across various domains, yet they perform poorly in deep layers. Existing research typically attributes this problem to node over-smoothing, where node representations become indistinguishable after multiple rounds of propagation. In this paper, we delve into the neighborhood propagation mechanism of GNNs and discover that the real root cause of GNNs' performance degradation in deep layers lies in ineffective neighborhood feature propagation. This propagation leads to an exponential growth of a node's current representation at every propagation step, making it extremely challenging to capture valuable dependencies between long-distance nodes. To address this issue, we introduce Graph Elimination Networks (GENs), which employ a specific algorithm to eliminate redundancies during neighborhood propagation. We demonstrate that GENs can enhance nodes' perception of distant neighborhoods and extend the depth of network propagation. Extensive experiments show that GENs outperform the state-of-the-art methods on various graph-level and node-level datasets.