Expressive power of temporal message passing

Wałęga, Przemysław Andrzej and Rawson, Michael (2025) Expressive power of temporal message passing. In Proceedings of the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: AAAI-25 Technical Tracks 20. vol. 39, AAAI Press. pp. 21000-21008 . (doi:10.1609/aaai.v39i20.35396).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently been adapted to temporal settings, often employing temporal versions of the message-passing mechanism known from GNNs. We divide temporal message passing mechanisms from literature into two main types: global and local, and establish Weisfeiler-Leman characterisations for both. This allows us to formally analyse expressive power of temporal message-passing models. We show that global and local temporal message-passing mechanisms have incomparable expressive power when applied to arbitrary temporal graphs. However, the local mechanism is strictly more expressive than the global mechanism when applied to colour-persistent temporal graphs, whose node colours are initially the same in all time points. Our theoretical findings are supported by experimental evidence, underlining practical implications of our analysis.

Text

_AAAI_25__MTGNN_expressive-1 - Accepted Manuscript

Restricted to Repository staff only

Request a copy