# gread_graph_neural_reactiondiffusion_networks__0393cdb1.pdf GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Jeongwhan Choi 1 Seoyoung Hong 1 Noseong Park 1 Sung-Bae Cho 1 Graph neural networks (GNNs) are one of the most popular research topics for deep learning. GNN methods typically have been designed on top of the graph signal processing theory. In particular, diffusion equations have been widely used for designing the core processing layer of GNNs, and therefore they are inevitably vulnerable to the notorious oversmoothing problem. Recently, a couple of papers paid attention to reaction equations in conjunctions with diffusion equations. However, they all consider limited forms of reaction equations. To this end, we present a reactiondiffusion equation-based GNN method that considers all popular types of reaction equations in addition to one special reaction equation designed by us. To our knowledge, our paper is one of the most comprehensive studies on reaction-diffusion equation-based GNNs. In our experiments with 9 datasets and 28 baselines, our method, called GREAD, outperforms them in a majority of cases. Further synthetic data experiments show that it mitigates the oversmoothing problem and works well for various homophily rates. 1. Introduction Graphs are a useful data format that occurs frequently in real-world applications, e.g., computer vision and graphics (Monti et al., 2017), molecular chemistry inference (Gilmer et al., 2017), recommender systems (Ying et al., 2018; Choi et al., 2023b), drug discovery (Gaudelet et al., 2021), traffic forecasting (Choi et al., 2022), and so forth. With the rise of graph-based data, graph neural networks (GNNs) are attracting much attention these days. However, there have been fierce debates on the neural network architecture of GNNs (Kipf & Welling, 2017; Veliˇckovi c et al., 2018; Defferrard et al., 2016; Wu et al., 1Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. Correspondence to: Noseong Park . Proceedings of the 40 th International Conference on Machine Learning, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. PMLR 202, 2023. Copyright 2023 by the author(s). Table 1. A comparison table of existing methods. means that it corresponds to a specific type of reaction only. Model Diffusion Reaction Continuous-time FA-GCN O X GPR-GNN O X ACM-GCN O X CGNN O X O GRAND O X O BLEND O X O GREAD O O O Figure 1. An illustrative comparison between the diffusion equation in Eq. (11) (bottom) and our proposed blurring-sharpening (reaction-diffusion) equation in Eq. (14) (top) on a grid graph with one-dimensional node features. The diffusion equation causes the problem of oversmoothing while the reaction-diffusion seeks a balance between smoothing and sharpening. 2019; Chen et al., 2020; Chien et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2020; Yan et al., 2022; Lim et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022; Luan et al., 2022; Rusch et al., 2022; Chamberlain et al., 2021b;a; Bodnar et al., 2022). For the past couple of years, many proposed methods have been designed based on the diffusion concept. Many recent GNN methods that rely on low-pass filters fall into this category. Although they have shown non-trivial successes in many tasks, it is still unclear whether it is an optimal direction of designing GNNs. In Table 1, we compare recent methods. Most of them GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Table 2. The average ranking/accuracy and the Olympic ranking of some selected high-performing models on 9 real-world datasets. (resp. ) indicates that an improvement over Glo GNN (resp. ACM-GCN) is statistically significant (p < 0.05) under the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Method Average Olympic Ranking Ranking Accuracy Gold Silver Bronze GREAD-BS 1.56 76.64 5 4 0 GREAD-FB* 6.72 74.51 0 0 3 GREAD-F 7.50 74.13 1 1 1 Glo GNN 8.17 74.99 0 0 1 GREAD-AC 8.50 73.71 1 0 0 ACM-GCN 8.67 74.92 0 1 0 GGCN 9.50 75.05 0 1 0 Sheaf 10.33 75.06 1 1 0 rely on diffusion processes, while some of them (i.e., FAGCN (Bo et al., 2021), GPR-GNN (Chien et al., 2021), and ACM-GCN (Luan et al., 2022)) partially utilize reaction processes. Those three methods, however, utilize limited forms of the reaction processes. In this regard, there do not exist any methods that fully consider diverse forms of reaction processes we consider 7 reaction processes. To this end, we propose the concept of graph neural reactiondiffusion network (GREAD), which is one of the most generalized architectures since we consider both the diffusion and the reaction processes. Reaction-diffusion equations are physical models that can be used when i) substances are diffused over space and time, and ii) they can sometimes react to each other. Whereas diffusion processes smooth node features on a graph out, reaction-diffusion processes lead to many local clusters that are also known as Turing patterns (Turing, 1952) (see Fig. 1). Since it is natural that nodes on a graph also constitute local clusters (in terms of class labels), we conjecture that reaction-diffusion equations are suitable for GNNs. Our proposed model, GREAD, consists of three parts: an encoder, a reaction-diffusion layer, and an output layer (cf. Eqs. (6) to (8)). The reaction-diffusion layer has seven different types in its core part as shown in Eq. (10): i) Fisher (F), ii) Allen-Cahn (AC), iii) Zeldovich (Z), iv) Blurringsharpening (BS), v) Source (S), vi) Filter Bank (FB), and vii) Filter Bank* (FB*). The first three reaction-diffusion equations are widely used in many natural science domains, e.g., biology, combustion, and so on, and the last three are used by some recent GNN methods (Xhonneux et al., 2020; Thorpe et al., 2022; Luan et al., 2022). In particular, the blurring-sharpening (BS) equation is designed by us and marks the best accuracy in many cases (cf. Table 2). For our experiments, we consider 6 heterophilic and 3 homophilic datasets heterophilic (resp. homophilic) means that neighboring nodes tend to have different (resp. similar) classes. We also compare our method with a comprehensive set of 28 baselines, which covers early to recent GNNs. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: 1. We design a reaction-diffusion layer that incorporates seven types of reaction equations, including one type, called BS, proposed by us. 2. We carefully integrate the seven reaction equation types into our GNN method and customize its overall architecture for better accuracy. For instance, we use a soft adjacency matrix generating method, which shows a synergistic effect with the reaction-diffusion layer. 3. We consider a comprehensive set of 9 datasets and 28 baselines. Our method marks the best accuracy in many cases. The ranking and accuracy averaged over all the datasets are summarized in Table 2. 2. Preliminaries & Related Work We first describe the meaning of the reaction-diffusion equation and various important GNN designs, followed by neural ordinary differential equations. 2.1. Reaction-Diffusion Equations Reaction diffusion equations are typically used to model the spatial and temporal change of the concentration of one or more chemical substances, i.e., substances are transformed into each other via local chemical reactions and spread out over a surface in space via diffusion. They are also frequently observed in other fields, such as biology, geology, physics (neutron diffusion theory), and ecology. In the field of graph machine learning, diffusion (resp. reaction) processes are typically carried out by applying low-pass (resp. high-pass) filters to graphs, which also corresponds to image blurring (resp. sharpening). 2.2. Graph Neural Networks Notation Let G = {V, E} be a graph with node set V and edge set E. The nodes are associated with a feature matrix X R|V| F , where |V| denotes the number of nodes and F denotes the number of input features. Araw {0, 1}|V| |V| is the adjacency matrix, where Araw [i,j] means the (i, j)-th element. The nodes are labelled by the index i V, and one-hop neighborhood of each node is denoted as Ni. The symmetric normalized Laplacian matrix, a commonly used feature aggregation matrix in GNNs, is defined as L := I D 1/2Araw D 1/2 = I A, where the diagonal degree matrix of Araw is D, and A := D 1/2Araw D 1/2 is the symmetric normalized adjacency matrix note that A [0, 1]|V| |V|. Graph Representation Learning GNNs (Kipf & Welling, 2017; Veliˇckovi c et al., 2018; Hamilton et al., 2017; GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Wu et al., 2019; Zhu & Koniusz, 2020) have many variants and applications. We focus on a brief introduction to the representation learning for nodes in supervised or semisupervised classification tasks. Most existing approaches follow the message-passing framework constructed by stacking layers that propagate and aggregate node features. The neighbor aggregation used in many existing GNNs implicitly exploits homogeneity and often fails to generalize to non-homogeneous graphs. Many existing GNNs operate as low-pass graph filters (Balcilar et al., 2021) that smooth features over the graph topology, which produces similar representations and as a result, similar predictions for neighboring nodes (Tiezzi et al., 2021; Oono & Suzuki, 2020; Li et al., 2018). Various GNNs were proposed to improve performance in low-homophily settings (Pei et al., 2020; Abu-El-Haija et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2020; Chien et al., 2021; He et al., 2021; Lim et al., 2021; Luan et al., 2022; Bodnar et al., 2022; Di Giovanni et al., 2022; Li et al., 2022) and alleviate the oversmoothing problem. (Xu et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2020; Zhao & Akoglu, 2020; Rusch et al., 2022). Diffusion on Graphs and Continuous GNNs The diffusion on graphs has recently been actively used in various applications (Freidlin & Wentzell, 1993; Freidlin & Sheu, 2000), including data clustering (Belkin & Niyogi, 2003; Coifman et al., 2005), image processing (Desquesnes et al., 2013; Elmoataz et al., 2008; Gilboa & Osher, 2009), and so on. It is to apply the following diffusion process to the feature matrix X of a graph: dt := div(A(X(t))) X(t)) = LX(t), (1) where div and are the divergence and the gradient operators, respectively. The initial features are evolved under the diffusion process to have the final representation. The diffusion equation and its unit-step Euler discretization can be defined as follows: X(t + 1) = X(t) LX(t) = (I L)X(t). (2) This is similar to GCN (Kipf & Welling, 2017) where the following augmented diffusion process with a weight matrix W and a nonlinear activation σ is used: σ((I L)X(t)W). (3) From this perspective, several papers have proposed continuous-depth GNNs (Wang et al., 2021; Choi et al., 2021; Hwang et al., 2021; Thorpe et al., 2022; Choi et al., 2023a) inspired by the graph diffusion equation. One recent work is GRAND (Chamberlain et al., 2021b), which parameterizes the diffusion equation on graphs with a neural network. BLEND (Chamberlain et al., 2021a) used a non-euclidean diffusion equation (known as Beltrami flow) to solve a joint positional feature space problem. These approaches contribute to non-trivial improvements in graph machine learning. We extend the diffusion to the reactiondiffusion equation in this work. 2.3. Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) Neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) (Chen et al., 2018c) solve the initial value problem (IVP), which involves a Riemann integral problem, to calculate h(ti+1) from h(ti): h(ti+1) = h(ti) + Z ti+1 ti f(h(ti), t; θf)dt, (4) where the neural network parameterized by θf approximates the time-derivative of h, i.e., h def = dh(t) dt . We rely on various ODE solvers to solve the integral problem, from the explicit Euler method to the 4th order Runge Kutta (RK4) method and the Dormand Prince (DOPRI) method (Dormand & Prince, 1980). For instance, the Euler method is as follows: h(t + h) = h(t) + τ f(h(t)), (5) where τ, which is usually smaller than 1, is a pre-configured step size. Eq. (5) is identical to a residual connection when h = 1 and therefore, NODEs are a continuous generalization of residual networks. 3. Proposed Method After describing an overview of our method, we describe its detailed designs, followed by its training algorithm. The theoretical and empirical complexity analyses are in Appendix D and F.3, respectively. 3.1. Overview of GREAD Given a graph G with its node feature matrix X, its symmetric normalized Laplacian matrix L, and its symmetric normalized adjacency A, the overall architecture of GREAD can be written as follows instead of A, we can also use a generated soft adjacency matrix A, which will be described in the next subsection: H(0) = e(X) (Encoding layer), (6) H(T) = H(0) + Z T 0 f(H(t))dt (Reac.-diff. layer), (7) ˆy = o(H(T)) (Output layer), (8) where f(H(t)) := d H(t) dt = αLH(t) + βr(H(t)) is in the reaction-diffusion form. r(H) is a reaction term, and α and β are trainable parameters to (de-)emphasize each term. e is an encoder embeds the node feature matrix X into an GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks initial hidden state H(0). We then evolve the initial hidden state to H(T) via the reaction-diffusion equation of f. The function o is an output layer for a downstream task, e.g., node classification. In particular, β can be either a scalar or a vector parameter, where the scalar setting means that we apply the same reaction process to all nodes and in the vector setting, we apply different reaction processes with different coefficients to nodes. The encoder e has a couple of fully-connected layers with rectified linear unit (Re LU) activations. The output layer o is typically a fully-connected layer, followed by a softmax activation for classification in our experiments. In particular, we consider almost all existing reaction terms for r, which is different from existing works that do not consider them in a thorough manner. In this perspective, our work is the most comprehensive study on reaction-diffusion GNNs to our knowledge. In the following subsection, we also show that some choices of the reaction term correspond to other famous models in other words, some other famous models are special cases of GREAD. 3.2. Soft Adjacency Matrix Generation Given a graph G, one can use its original symmetric normalized adjacency matrix A [0, 1]|V| |V| for f(H(t)). However, we also provide the method to generate a soft adjacency matrix, denoted A [0, 1]|V| |V| we use L to denote the Laplacian counterpart of A. Our soft adjacency matrix plays a crucial role in learning diffusivity. Our reaction-diffusion layer uses the soft adjacency matrix to learn the diffusivity. In order to generate such soft adjacency matrices, we use the scaled dot product method (Vaswani et al., 2017): A[i,j] := softmax (WKHi)T WQHj where A[i,j] means the (i, j)-th element of A, WK and WQ are trainable parameters, and d K is the scale factor. Hi, Hj are trainable embedding vectors of nodes i, j. 3.3. Reaction-diffusion Layer Eq. (7) is our method s main processing layer, called the reaction-diffusion layer. Given the definition of f, LH(t) is a diffusion term that corresponds to the heat equation describing the spread of heat over G and has been used widely by various GNNs (Wang et al., 2021; Choi et al., 2021; Chamberlain et al., 2021b). It is known that the diffusion term causes the problem of oversmoothing, which means that the last hidden states of nodes become too similar when applying only the diffusion processing too much. To this end, many models prefer shallow architectures that do not cause the oversmoothing problem (Wu et al., 2019; Kipf & Welling, 2017) or use heuristic methods to prevent it (Zhao & Akoglu, 2020; Chen et al., 2018a; 2020; Li et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2018b). In our case, we prevent the oversmoothing problem by adding the reaction term r and solving Eq. (7) with ODE solvers (Dormand & Prince, 1980). In other words, our reaction-diffusion layer is continuous, which is yet another distinguishing point of our method since many other models are based on discrete layers (Kipf & Welling, 2017; Bo et al., 2021; Chien et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2020; Hamilton et al., 2017). We consider the following options for r: H(t) (1 H(t)), if Fisher (F) H(t) (1 H(t) 2), if Allen-Cahn (AC) H(t) (H(t) H(t) 2), if Zeldovich (Z) ( A A2)H(t), if Blurring-Sharpening (BS) H(0), if Source Term (ST) LH(t), if Filter Bank (FB) LH(t) + H(t), if Filter Bank* (FB*) where means the Hadamard product, and 2 means the Hadamard power. The first three reaction terms, i.e., F, AC, and Z, are widely used in various domains. For instance, F is used to describe the spreading of biological populations (Fisher, 1937), and AC is used for describing the phase separation process in multi-component alloy systems, which includes orderdisorder transitions (Allen & Cahn, 1979). Z is a generalized equation that describes the phenomena that occur in combustion theory (Gilding & Kersner, 2004). The last BS is specially designed by us for GNNs, which we will describe shortly. ST is a case where the initial hidden state is added as a reaction term (Xhonneux et al., 2020). ST is not theoretically a reaction process, but we consider it as part of our model since their goals are the same, i.e., alleviating the notorious oversmoothing problem. FB means high-pass filters that correspond to reaction processes. By adding a high-pass filter, our reaction-diffusion layer acts like a filter bank holding the low and high-pass filters. FB* is a reaction term that also considers the identity channel H(t). Blurring-Sharpening (BS) Given the reaction-diffusion layer in Eq. (7), the proposed blurring-sharpening (BS) process, whose time-derivative of H(t) will be defined in Eq. (14), is to perform the blurring (diffusion) and the sharpening (reaction) operations alternately in the layer. We show that our proposed blurring-sharpening process reduces to a certain form of the reaction-diffusion process. Many GNNs can be generalized to the following blurring (or diffusion) process, i.e., the low-pass graph convolutional filtering for GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Algorithm 1 How to train our proposed GREAD Input: Training data Dtrain, Validating data Dval, Maximum iteration number max iter Initialize model parameters θ; k 0; while k < max iter do Construct a mini-batch B from Dtrain Train θ with Eq. (15) and B; Validate and update the best parameters θ with Dval k k + 1; end return θ ; blurring. We also use the same blurring operation at first: B(t + h) = H(t) LH(t), H(t) + ( A I)H(t), We then propose to apply the following high-pass graph convolutional filtering or sharpening process to B(t + h). In other words, there is a sharpening process following the above blurring process in a layer as follows the full derivation is in Appendix C: H(t + h) = B(t + h) + L(B(t + h)), H(t) LH(t) + ( A A2)H(t). (12) Therefore, we can derive the following difference equation: H(t + h) H(t) = LH(t) + ( A A2)H(t). (13) After taking the limit of h 0 and adding the coefficients α, β, f(H(t)) := d H(t) dt = α LH(t) + β( A A2)H(t), which is a reaction-diffusion equation where r(H(t)) := ( A A2)H(t). Therefore, our proposed method, BS, uses the reaction-diffusion layer in Eq. (7) with the specific timederivative definition of Eq. (14). 3.4. Training Algorithm We use Alg. (1) to train our proposed model. The full training process minimizes the cross-entropy loss: i y T i log ˆyi, (15) where yi is the one-hot ground truth vector of i-th training sample, and ˆyi is its inference outcome by our model. 3.5. Comparison with GNNs When ST is used, GREAD is analogous to GCNII in the perspective that both methods inject the initial hidden state. GREAD, FA-GCN, and GPR-GNN differ in how to utilize low and high-pass filters. FA-GCN learns edge-level aggregation weights as in GAT but allows negative weights. GPR-GNN uses learnable weights that can be both positive and negative for feature propagation. Those enable FA-GCN and GPR-GNN to adapt to heterophilic graphs and to handle both high and low-frequency parts of graph signals. However, GREAD-BS sharpens low-pass filtered signals following our developed reaction-diffusion system. GREAD-BS also adaptively adjusts each term. We also compare with some continuous-time GNN models. CGNN can be derived from the reaction-diffusion layer in Eq. (7) with L by setting f with r(H(t)) := H(0) and using a weight parameter W: f(H(t))CGNN := LH(t) + H(t)W + H(0). (16) The linear GRAND model corresponds to using only our diffusion process: f(H(t))GRAND := LH(t) = (I A)H(t). (17) We note that two continuous models can not capture high frequency parts. In particular, GRAND does not use any reaction term. 4. Experiments We first compare our method with other baselines for node classification tasks. We then discuss the ability of mitigating oversmoothing on a synthetic graph and show the experiment with different heterophily levels on other synthetic graphs. Our code is available at https://github. com/jeongwhanchoi/GREAD. 4.1. Node Classification on Real-world Datasets Real-world Datasets We now evaluate the performance of GREAD and existing GNNs on a variety of real-world datasets. We consider 6 heterophilic datasets with low homophily ratios used in (Pei et al., 2020): i,ii) Chameleon, Squirrel (Rozemberczki et al., 2021), iii) Film (Tang et al., 2009), iv, v, vi) Texas, Wisconsin and Cornell from Web KB. We also test on 3 homophilic graphs with high homophily ratios: i) Cora (Mc Callum et al., 2000), ii) Cite Seer (Sen et al., 2008), iii) Pub Med (Yang et al., 2016). Table 3 summarizes the number/size of nodes, edges, classes, features, and the homophily ratio. We use the dataset splits taken from (Pei et al., 2020). We report the mean and standard deviation accuracy after running each experiment with 10 fixed train/val/test splits. GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Table 3. Benchmark dataset properties and statistics Dataset Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med Classes 5 5 5 5 5 5 6 7 3 Features 1,703 1,703 1,703 932 2,089 235 1,433 3,703 500 Nodes 183 251 183 7,600 5,201 2,277 2,708 3,327 19,717 Edges 279 466 277 26,752 198,353 31,371 5,278 4,552 44,324 Hom. ratio 0.11 0.21 0.30 0.22 0.22 0.23 0.81 0.74 0.80 Table 4. Results on real-world datasets: mean std. dev. accuracy for 10 different data splits. We show the best three methods in red (first), blue (second), and purple (third). Other missing 16 baselines are in Appendix B. Dataset Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med Avg. Geom-GCN 66.76 2.72 64.51 3.66 60.54 3.67 31.59 1.15 38.15 0.92 60.00 2.81 85.35 1.57 78.02 1.15 89.95 0.47 63.87 H2GCN 84.86 7.23 87.65 4.98 82.70 5.28 35.70 1.00 36.48 1.86 60.11 2.15 87.87 1.20 77.11 1.57 89.49 0.38 71.33 GGCN 84.86 4.55 86.86 3.29 85.68 6.63 37.54 1.56 55.17 1.58 71.14 1.84 87.95 1.05 77.14 1.45 89.15 0.37 75.05 LINKX 74.60 8.37 75.49 5.72 77.84 5.81 36.10 1.55 61.81 1.80 68.42 1.38 84.64 1.13 73.19 0.99 87.86 0.77 71.11 Glo GNN 84.32 4.15 87.06 3.53 83.51 4.26 37.35 1.30 57.54 1.39 69.78 2.42 88.31 1.13 77.41 1.65 89.62 0.35 74.99 ACM-GCN 87.84 4.40 88.43 3.22 85.14 6.07 36.28 1.09 54.40 1.88 66.93 1.85 87.91 0.95 77.32 1.70 90.00 0.52 74.92 GCNII 77.57 3.83 80.39 3.40 77.86 3.79 37.44 1.30 38.47 1.58 63.86 3.04 88.37 1.25 77.33 1.48 90.15 0.43 70.16 CGNN 71.35 4.05 74.31 7.26 66.22 7.69 35.95 0.86 29.24 1.09 46.89 1.66 87.10 1.35 76.91 1.81 87.70 0.49 63.96 GRAND 75.68 7.25 79.41 3.64 82.16 7.09 35.62 1.01 40.05 1.50 54.67 2.54 87.36 0.96 76.46 1.77 89.02 0.51 68.94 BLEND 83.24 4.65 84.12 3.56 85.95 6.82 35.63 1.01 43.06 1.39 60.11 2.09 88.09 1.22 76.63 1.60 89.24 0.42 71.79 Sheaf 85.05 5.51 89.41 4.74 84.86 4.71 37.81 1.15 56.34 1.32 68.04 1.58 86.90 1.13 76.70 1.57 89.49 0.40 75.06 GRAFF 88.38 4.53 87.45 2.94 83.24 6.49 36.09 0.81 54.52 1.37 71.08 1.75 87.61 0.97 76.92 1.70 88.95 0.52 74.92 GREAD-BS 88.92 3.72 89.41 3.30 86.49 7.15 37.90 1.17 59.22 1.44 71.38 1.31 88.57 0.66 77.60 1.81 90.23 0.55 76.64 GREAD-F 89.73 4.49 86.47 4.84 86.49 5.13 36.72 0.66 46.16 1.44 65.20 1.40 88.39 0.91 77.40 1.54 90.09 0.31 74.13 GREAD-AC 85.95 2.65 86.08 3.56 87.03 4.95 37.21 1.10 45.10 2.11 65.09 1.08 88.29 0.67 77.38 1.53 90.10 0.36 73.71 GREAD-Z 87.30 5.68 86.29 4.32 85.68 5.41 37.01 1.11 46.25 1.72 62.70 2.30 88.31 1.10 77.39 1.90 90.11 0.27 73.45 GREAD-ST 81.08 5.67 86.67 3.01 86.22 5.98 37.66 0.90 45.83 1.40 63.03 1.32 88.47 1.19 77.25 1.47 90.13 0.36 72.93 GREAD-FB 86.76 5.05 87.65 3.17 86.22 5.85 37.40 0.55 50.83 2.27 66.05 1.21 88.03 0.78 77.28 1.73 90.07 0.45 74.48 GREAD-FB* 87.03 3.97 88.04 1.63 85.95 5.64 37.70 0.51 50.57 1.52 65.83 1.10 88.01 0.80 77.42 1.93 90.08 0.46 74.51 (c) t = 3.5 Figure 2. The snapshots of the evolution process of the node feature at various ODE time points in GREAD for Cora. Different colors correspond to different ground truth classes. More visualizations in other datasets are in Appendix F.4. Baselines We use a comprehensive set of baselines classified into the following four groups: 1. In the first group of baselines, we consider classical GNN methods: Cheb Net (Defferrard et al., 2016), GCN (Kipf & Welling, 2017), GAT (Veliˇckovi c et al., 2018), Graph SAGE (Hamilton et al., 2017), and SGC (Wu et al., 2019). 2. The next group includes the GNN methods designed for heterophilic settings: Mix Hop (Abu-El-Haija et al., 2019), Geom-GCN (Pei et al., 2020), H2GCN (Zhu et al., 2020), FA-GCN (Bo et al., 2021), GPRGNN (Chien et al., 2021), WRGAT (Suresh et al., 2021), GGCN (Yan et al., 2022), LINKX (Lim et al., 2021), Glo GNN (Li et al., 2022) and ACM-GCN (Luan et al., 2022). 3. The third group has GNN methods tackling the oversmoothing problem: Pair Norm (Zhao & Akoglu, 2020), JKNet (Xu et al., 2018), GCNII (Chen et al., 2020), and GCON (Rusch et al., 2022). 4. The last group contains continuous-time GNN methods: GDE (Poli et al., 2019), CGNN (Xhonneux et al., 2020), GRAND (Chamberlain et al., 2021b), BLEND (Chamberlain et al., 2021a), ACMP (Wang et al., 2023), Sheaf (Bodnar et al., 2022), and GRAFF (Di Giovanni et al., 2022). Hyperparameters For our method, we test with the following hyperparameter configurations: we train for 200 epochs using the Adam optimizer. The detailed search space and other hyperparameters are in Appendix E.2. We also list the best hyperparameter configuration for each data in Appendix E.2. If a baseline s accuracy is known and its GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Table 5. Ablation study on soft adjacency matrix. More results in other datasets are in Appendix F.1. Dataset A BS F AC Z ST FB FB* Cornell OA 85.14 85.41 83.51 83.78 85.41 85.19 83.90 SA 86.49 86.49 87.03 85.68 86.22 86.22 85.95 Film OA 37.24 36.68 35.93 36.04 37.43 37.18 37.13 SA 37.90 37.20 37.21 37.01 37.66 37.40 37.70 Table 6. Ablation study on β. More results in other datasets are in Appendix F.1. Dataset A BS F AC Z ST FB FB* Texas SC 81.35 84.05 85.41 87.30 79.73 76.95 77.08 VC 88.92 89.73 85.95 86.49 81.08 86.76 87.03 Wisconsin SC 84.71 85.69 86.08 84.51 83.52 84.24 86.21 VC 89.41 86.47 85.69 86.29 86.67 87.65 88.04 experimental environments are the same as ours, we use the officially announced accuracy. If not, we execute a baseline using its official codes and the hyperparameter search procedures based on their suggested hyperparameter ranges. Experimental Results Table 2 shows the average ranking and accuracy in all the real-world datasets. GREADBS is ranked at the top with the average ranking of 1.56. GREAD-BS shows a clearly higher ranking in comparison with Glo GNN and others. In Fig. 2, we visualize the hidden node features at each ODE time step of Eq. (7), and the reaction-diffusion processes of GREAD lead to local clusters after several steps. Table 4 presents the detailed classification performance. As reported, our method marks the best accuracy in all cases except for Squirrel and Citeseer. Glo GNN and Sheaf show comparable accuracy values from time to time. However, there are no existing methods that are as stable as GREADBS. For example, GCNII shows reasonably high accuracy in homophilic datasets, but not heterophilic ones. Sheaf shows the best or the second-best place in merely two cases. While GREAD-BS is the best method overall, GREAD-F is the best method for Texas and is the second-best for Cornell. GREAD-AC marks the best accuracy on Cornell. Ablation Studies We conduct ablation studies about the soft adjacency matrix generation. GREAD can use both the original symmetric normalized adjacency matrix, denoted as OA, and the soft adjacency matrix denoted as SA. We compare both options. As reported in Table 5, SA increases the model accuracy in Cornell and Film. Next, we also perform the ablation study on β. β can be either a scalar parameter (denoted as SC) or a learnable vector parameter (denoted as VC). We compare them in GREAD-BS GREAD-ST GREAD-F GREAD-FB GREAD-AC GREAD-FB* 1.0 1.5 2.0 Time Test accuracy (a) Chameleon 3.0 3.5 4.0 Time Test accuracy Figure 3. Sensitivity to T. More results in other datasets are in Appendix F.2. GREAD-BS GREAD-ST GREAD-F GREAD-FB GREAD-AC GREAD-FB* 0.1 0.25 0.5 0.75 1.0 Test accuracy (a) Chameleon 0.1 0.2 0.25 0.5 1.0 Step size Test accuracy Figure 4. Sensitivity to the ODE step size τ. More results in other datasets are in Appendix F.2. Table 6. VC shows effectiveness for most cases. The VC setting creates a reaction-diffusion process rich enough to classify nodes, as shown in Fig. 2. Sensitivity w.r.t. the Terminal Integration Time T By varying T in Eq. (7), we investigate how the model accuracy changes. The detailed results are in Fig. 3. In Chameleon, GREAD-BS achieves the highest mean test accuracy at T = 1.9. Sensitivity w.r.t. the ODE Step Size τ Fig. 4 shows the mean test accuracy by varying the step size τ of RK4. In Chameleon, GREAD-BS shows stable test accuracy at all the step sizes, whereas in Cora, GREAD-BS tends to show higher accuracy with larger step sizes. 4.2. Oversmoothing and Dirichlet Energy The Dirichlet Energy We can analyze the degree of oversmoothing (Nt & Maehara, 2019; Oono & Suzuki, 2020) from the perspective of the Dirichlet energy (Rusch et al., 2022; 2023). The Dirichlet energy E(H, Araw) on the node hidden feature H of an undirected graph G is defined as follows: E(H, Araw) = 1 j Ni Araw [i,j]||Hi Hj||2, (18) GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks 0 10 20 30 40 Layers (Time) Dirichlet energy GCN GAT FAGCN GPRGNN GCNII H2GCN GRAND BLEND GREAD-FB* GREAD-FB GREAD-ST GREAD-Z GREAD-AC GREAD-F GREAD-BS Figure 5. Evolution of the Dirichlet energy on the synthetic random graph. The Y-axis is the logarithmic Dirichlet energy in each layer s output given a GNN of 40 layers. where Hi, Hj mean i-th and j-th rows, respectively. The oversmoothing phenomenon means that as the depth increases, all node features converge to constants. Thus, E(H, A) decays to zero asymptotically in time. We will show, via the evolution of the Dirichlet energy, that our proposed method mitigates the oversmoothing problem. Experimental Environments We use the synthetic dataset, called c SBMs (Deshpande et al., 2018), to demonstrate the mitigation of oversmoothing. This synthetic data is an undirected graph representing 100 nodes in a twodimensional space with two classes randomly connected with a probability of p = 0.9. We report the layer-wise Dirichlet energy given a GNN of 40 layers. Experimental Results Fig. 5 demonstrates traditional GNNs, such as GCN, and GAT, suffer from oversmoothing because the Dirichlet energy decays exponentially to zero in the first five layers. Converging to zero indicates that the node features become constant, while GREAD has no such behaviors. The Dirichlet energy of GREAD can be bounded in time thanks to the reaction term. GRAND only has a diffusion term with learned diffusivity, so that it can delay the oversmoothing. In the case of H2GCN, it is impossible to report on deeper layers due to memory limitations. 4.3. Different Homophily Levels Experimental Environments In order to test the classification capability of GNNs, we use the synthetic Cora generator (Zhu et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021). We generate synthetic graphs with various homophily ratios and report the test accuracy. Experimental Results Fig. 6 shows the mean test accuracy on all random splits of the synthetic Cora datasets. MLP, which does not consider the connectivity of nodes, 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 Homophily rate Test accuracy H2GCN GRAND BLEND GREAD-BS (a) GREAD-BS vs. baselines 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 Homophily rate Test accuracy GREAD-FB* GREAD-FB GREAD-ST GREAD-Z GREAD-AC GREAD-F GREAD-BS Figure 6. Experiments on the synthetic Cora with controlled homophily rates. maintains its test accuracy for all homophily rates, which is obvious. GCN, GAT, and GRAND, which consider only diffusion, perform poorly at low homophily settings. H2GCN shows reasonable performance on low homophily rates, but its accuracy suddenly decreases at some homophily settings. All GREAD models have the best trend overall without sudden drops. The reaction terms of GREAD contribute to their stable accuracy for both homophily and heterophily settings compared with other models that rely on only diffusion processes, such as GCN and GRAND. 5. Conclusions We presented the concept of graph neural reaction-diffusion equation, called GREAD. Our proposed GREAD is one of the most generalized architectures considering both the diffusion and reaction processes. We design a reactiondiffusion layer that has three types of reaction equations widely used in natural sciences. We also add four reaction terms, including one special reaction term called Blurringsharpening (BS) designed by us for GNNs. Therefore, our reaction-diffusion layer has seven types. We consider a comprehensive set of 9 real-world datasets with various homophily difficulties and 28 baselines. GREAD marks the best accuracy in almost all cases. In our experiments with the two kinds of synthetic datasets, GREAD shows that it alleviates the oversmoothing problem and performs well on various homophily rates. This shows that our proposed model is a novel framework for constructing GNNs using the concept of the reaction-diffusion equation. Acknowledgement Noseong Park is the corresponding author. This work was supported by an IITP grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (No.2020-0-01361, Artificial Intelligence Graduate School Program (Yonsei University), 10%) and an ETRI grant funded by the Korean government (23ZS1100, Core Technology Research for Self-Improving Integrated Artificial Intelligence System, 90%). GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Abu-El-Haija, S., Perozzi, B., Kapoor, A., Alipourfard, N., Lerman, K., Harutyunyan, H., Ver Steeg, G., and Galstyan, A. Mixhop: Higher-order graph convolutional architectures via sparsified neighborhood mixing. In ICML, pp. 21 29, 2019. Allen, S. M. and Cahn, J. W. 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In Neur IPS, 2020. GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks A. Full Ranking of Table 2 We show the average ranking/accuracy and the Olympic ranking of all methods in Table 7. Our methods occupy all the top-4 positions. Table 7. The average ranking/accuracy and the Olympic ranking in the 9 real-world datasets. Methods are sorted by Avg. Ranking. Method Average Olympic Ranking Ranking Accuracy Gold Silver Bronze GREAD-BS 1.56 76.64 5 4 0 GREAD-FB* 6.72 74.51 0 0 3 GREAD-F 7.50 74.13 1 1 1 GREAD-FB 7.89 74.48 0 0 1 Glo GNN 8.17 74.99 0 0 1 GREAD-AC 8.50 73.71 1 0 0 ACM-GCN 8.67 74.92 0 1 0 GGCN 9.50 75.05 0 1 0 GREAD-Z 9.56 73.45 0 0 0 GREAD-ST 9.83 72.93 0 1 2 Sheaf 10.33 75.06 1 1 0 GRAFF 11.28 74.92 0 0 2 WRGAT 13.61 73.02 0 0 0 GCNII 14.56 70.16 0 0 0 H2GCN 16.00 71.33 0 0 0 BLEND 16.11 71.79 0 0 0 ACMP 19.44 71.98 0 0 0 GCON-GCN 20.17 69.46 0 0 1 LINKX 21.44 71.11 1 0 0 FA-GCN 21.89 69.86 0 0 0 GRAND 22.28 68.94 0 0 0 GCON-GAT 22.89 68.96 0 0 0 GPR-GNN 23.17 67.45 0 0 0 Graph SAGE 23.56 69.50 0 0 0 Geom-GCN 23.83 63.87 0 0 0 Mixhop 24.50 68.10 0 0 0 GCN 24.61 62.77 0 0 0 GDE 24.67 67.40 0 0 0 MLP 25.61 66.26 0 0 0 CGNN 26.11 63.96 0 0 0 Cheb Net 26.56 67.98 0 0 0 GAT 28.22 60.23 0 0 0 Pair Norm 28.56 61.68 0 0 0 JKNet 30.06 60.77 0 0 0 SGC 32.56 58.34 0 0 0 GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks B. Full Result of Table 4 We reported only the selected highly-performing 12 baselines in Table 4. We now report all the detailed results of the tested 28 baselines in Table 8. Table 8. Results on real-world datasets: mean std. dev. accuracy for 10 different data splits. We show the best three methods in red (first), blue (second), and purple (third). Dataset Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med MLP 80.81 4.75 85.29 3.31 81.89 6.40 36.53 0.70 28.77 1.56 46.21 2.99 87.16 0.37 74.02 1.90 75.69 2.00 GCN 55.14 5.16 51.76 3.06 60.54 5.30 27.32 1.10 53.43 2.01 64.82 2.24 86.98 1.27 76.50 1.36 88.42 0.50 Cheb Net 78.37 6.04 79.02 3.18 75.68 6.94 34.13 1.09 36.43 1.17 58.64 1.64 85.45 1.58 75.07 1.25 89.00 0.46 GAT 52.16 6.63 49.41 4.09 61.89 5.05 27.44 0.89 40.72 1.55 60.26 2.50 86.33 0.48 76.55 1.23 87.30 1.10 Graph SAGE 82.43 6.14 81.18 5.56 75.95 5.01 34.23 0.99 41.61 0.74 58.73 1.68 86.90 1.04 76.04 1.30 88.45 0.50 SGC 58.10 4.20 55.29 4.28 60.00 3.59 27.20 1.52 33.00 1.97 42.45 3.82 86.12 1.44 76.01 1.31 86.90 1.32 Mix Hop 77.84 7.73 75.88 4.90 73.51 6.34 32.22 2.34 43.80 1.48 60.50 2.53 87.61 0.85 76.26 1.33 85.31 0.61 Geom-GCN 66.76 2.72 64.51 3.66 60.54 3.67 31.59 1.15 38.15 0.92 60.00 2.81 85.35 1.57 78.02 1.15 89.95 0.47 FA-GCN 82.43 6.89 82.94 7.95 79.19 9.79 34.87 1.25 42.59 0.79 55.22 3.19 87.21 1.43 76.87 1.56 87.45 0.61 GPR-GNN 78.38 4.36 82.94 4.21 80.27 8.11 34.63 1.22 31.61 1.24 46.58 1.84 87.95 1.18 77.13 1.67 87.54 0.38 H2GCN 84.86 7.23 87.65 4.98 82.70 5.28 35.70 1.00 36.48 1.86 60.11 2.15 87.87 1.20 77.11 1.57 89.49 0.38 WRGAT 83.62 5.50 86.98 3.78 81.62 3.90 36.53 0.77 48.85 0.78 65.24 0.87 88.20 2.26 76.81 1.89 89.29 0.38 GGCN 84.86 4.55 86.86 3.29 85.68 6.63 37.54 1.56 55.17 1.58 71.14 1.84 87.95 1.05 77.14 1.45 89.15 0.37 LINKX 74.60 8.37 75.49 5.72 77.84 5.81 36.10 1.55 61.81 1.80 68.42 1.38 84.64 1.13 73.19 0.99 87.86 0.77 Glo GNN 84.32 4.15 87.06 3.53 83.51 4.26 37.35 1.30 57.54 1.39 69.78 2.42 88.31 1.13 77.41 1.65 89.62 0.35 ACM-GCN 87.84 4.40 88.43 3.22 85.14 6.07 36.28 1.09 54.40 1.88 66.93 1.85 87.91 0.95 77.32 1.70 90.00 0.52 Pair Norm 60.27 4.34 48.43 6.14 58.92 3.15 27.40 1.24 50.44 2.04 62.74 2.82 85.79 1.01 73.59 1.47 87.53 0.44 JKNet 62.70 8.34 53.14 5.22 59.72 4.60 29.25 1.37 39.78 1.72 52.63 3.90 86.48 1.04 75.99 1.28 87.23 0.55 GCNII 77.57 3.83 80.39 3.40 77.86 3.79 37.44 1.30 38.47 1.58 63.86 3.04 88.37 1.25 77.33 1.48 90.15 0.43 GCON-GCN 85.40 4.20 87.80 3.30 84.30 4.80 34.65 0.61 33.30 1.57 48.08 2.16 87.40 1.82 76.46 1.70 87.71 0.35 GCON-GAT 82.20 4.70 85.70 3.60 83.20 7.00 35.85 0.84 34.45 1.08 48.31 1.53 86.96 1.73 76.20 2.12 87.73 0.41 CGNN 71.35 4.05 74.31 7.26 66.22 7.69 35.95 0.86 29.24 1.09 46.89 1.66 87.10 1.35 76.91 1.81 87.70 0.49 GDE 74.05 6.96 79.80 5.62 82.43 7.07 35.36 1.31 35.94 1.91 47.76 2.08 87.22 1.41 76.21 2.11 87.80 0.38 GRAND 75.68 7.25 79.41 3.64 82.16 7.09 35.62 1.01 40.05 1.50 54.67 2.54 87.36 0.96 76.46 1.77 89.02 0.51 BLEND 83.24 4.65 84.12 3.56 85.95 6.82 35.63 1.01 43.06 1.39 60.11 2.09 88.09 1.22 76.63 1.60 89.24 0.42 ACMP 86.20 0.30 86.10 0.40 85.40 0.70 34.44 4.44 52.65 2.23 52.63 2.28 86.38 3.79 76.52 1.84 87.54 0.57 Sheaf 85.05 5.51 89.41 4.74 84.86 4.71 37.81 1.15 56.34 1.32 68.04 1.58 86.90 1.13 76.70 1.57 89.49 0.40 GRAFF 88.38 4.53 87.45 2.94 83.24 6.49 36.09 0.81 54.52 1.37 71.08 1.75 87.61 0.97 76.92 1.70 88.95 0.52 GREAD-BS 88.92 3.72 89.41 3.30 86.49 7.15 37.90 1.17 59.22 1.44 71.38 1.53 88.57 0.66 77.60 1.81 90.23 0.55 GREAD-F 89.73 4.49 86.47 4.84 86.49 5.13 36.72 0.66 46.16 1.44 65.20 1.40 88.39 0.91 77.40 1.54 90.09 0.31 GREAD-AC 85.95 2.65 86.08 3.56 87.03 4.95 37.21 1.10 45.10 2.11 65.09 1.08 88.29 0.67 77.38 1.53 90.10 0.36 GREAD-Z 87.30 5.68 86.29 4.32 85.68 5.41 37.01 1.11 46.25 1.72 62.70 2.30 88.31 1.10 77.39 1.90 90.11 0.27 GREAD-ST 81.08 5.67 86.67 3.01 86.22 5.98 37.66 0.90 45.83 1.40 63.03 1.32 88.47 1.19 77.25 1.47 90.13 0.36 GREAD-FB 86.76 5.05 87.65 3.17 86.22 5.85 37.40 0.55 50.83 2.27 66.05 1.21 88.01 1.34 77.28 1.73 90.07 0.45 GREAD-FB* 87.03 3.97 88.04 1.63 85.95 5.64 37.70 0.51 50.57 1.52 65.83 1.10 88.01 0.80 77.42 1.93 90.08 0.46 GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks C. Full Derivation of Eq. (12) We show the omitted intermediate derivation steps of Eq. (12). H(t + h) = B(t + h) + L(B(t + h)), AH(t) + L( AH(t)), AH(t) + (I A) AH(t), 2 AH(t) A2H(t), (2I A) AH(t), (I + L)(I L)H(t), H(t) L2H(t), H(t) (I A)2H(t), H(t) (I A)H(t) + ( A A2)H(t), H(t) LH(t) + ( A A2)H(t). D. Computational Complexity The space complexity of GREAD is dominated by evaluating the soft adjacency matrix in Eq. (9), which is O(|E|dim(H)), where |E| is the number of edges and dim(H) is the size of hidden dimension. We also analyze the time complexity of the reaction-diffusion layer in Eq. (7). Our proposed model has different complexity depending on the reaction term r in Eq. (10). If we set the adjacency matrix and β to OA and SC respectively, the time complexity of the one-step GREAD-BS computation becomes O(nτ(|E| + |E2|)dim(H) + |E|dmax), where nτ, |V|, and dmax are the number of steps in [0, T], the number of nodes, and the maximum degree of all nodes, respectively. Given that A is sparse, we can calculate A2 in O(|E|dmax) because dmax is equal to the maximum number of non-zeroes in any row of A. The sparse matrix multiplication of A2H(t) takes O(|E2|dmax), where |E2| = 1 v V |N2|(v). The computational complexity of the one-step GREAD-F computation is O(nτ(|E| + dim(H)k))dim(H)), where k = 1. In the case of GREAD-AC and GREAD-Z, their k values are 2 and 3, respectively. The computational complexities of the one-step GREAD-ST, GREAD-FB, and GREAD-FB* are O(nτ|E|dim(H) + |E|dmax). E. Additional Details for Experiments E.1. Details of Datasets Real-world Datasets For the experiment with real-world datasets in Table 4, we consider both the heterophilic and homophilic datasets. They can be distinguished based on the homophily level. We employ the homophily ratio, defined by (Pei et al., 2020), to distinguish high or low homophily/heterophily graphs: Homophily ratio = 1 u Nv(yu = yv) |Nv| . (19) A high homophily ratio means that neighbors tend to be in an identical class. Some dataset statistics are given in Table 3. The 9 real-world datasets we consider are as follows: Chameleon and Squirrel are subgraphs of web pages in Wikipedia (Rozemberczki et al., 2021). The node in Wikipedia graphs represent web pages, the edge mean mutual links between pages, and the node feature corresponds to several informative nouns in the Wikipedia page. All nodes are classified into 5 categories based on the average monthly traffic. Film is a subgraph of the film-director-actor-writer network (Tang et al., 2009). Each node corresponds to an actor, an edge between two nodes denotes the co-occurrence relationship in a Wikipedia page, and the node feature corresponds to some keywords in the Wikipedia page. All nodes are classified into 5 categories according to the type of actors. GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Cornell, Texas, and Wisconsin are three subsets of the Web KB dataset collected by CMU, having many links between web pages of the universities. In these networks, nodes represent web pages, edges are hyperlinks between them, and node features are the bag-of-words representation of web pages. All nodes are classified into 5 categories: student, project, course, staff, and faculty. Cora (Mc Callum et al., 2000), Citeseer (Sen et al., 2008), and Pubmed (Yang et al., 2016) are among the most widely used benchmark datasets for the semi-supervised node classification. These are citation networks, where nodes, edges, features, and labels respectively correspond to papers, undirected paper citations, the bag-of-words representations of papers, and the academic topics of papers. The Synthetic Cora Network The synthetic Cora dataset is provided by (Zhu et al., 2020). They generate graphs for a target homophily level using a modified preferential attachment process. Nodes, edges, and features are sampled from Cora to create a synthetic graph with a desired homogeneity and feature/label distribution. In Table 9, we summarize the properties of the synthetic Cora networks we used. Table 9. The detailed information of the synthetic Cora. All levels of homophily have the same number of features (1,433), nodes (1,480), edges (5,936), and classes (5). Homophily Avg. Degree Max. Degree Min. Degree 0.0 3.98 84.33 1.67 0.1 3.98 71.33 2.00 0.2 3.98 73.33 1.67 0.3 3.98 70.00 2.00 0.4 3.98 77.67 2.00 0.5 3.98 76.33 2.00 0.6 3.98 76.00 1.67 0.7 3.98 67.67 2.00 0.8 3.98 58.00 1.67 0.9 3.98 58.00 1.67 1.0 3.98 51.00 2.00 The c SBM Synthetic Network For Fig. 5, we use c SBM (Deshpande et al., 2018) to generate synthetic networks. c SBM generates Gaussian random vectors as node features on top of the classical SBM. The synthetic graph has 100 nodes with 2 classes and two-dimensional features sampled from a normal distribution with σ = 2, µ1 = 0.5, and µ2 = 0.5. The nodes are randomly connected with a probability of p = 0.9 if they are in the same class and p = 0.1 otherwise. E.2. Details of Experimental Settings Evolution of the Dirichlet Energy We use the random graphs generated by c SBM to show the capability of GREAD to alleviate oversmoothing. In the case of GREAD, we run without any hyperparamerter search but list the full hyperparameter list we used in Table 10. Comparison with Various Homophily Rate To compare the performance in various homophily rates, we use the synthetic Cora network. We run the experiment with 3 fixed train/valid/test splits and report the mean and the standard deviation of accuracy accordingly. In Table 11, we list the hyperparameter range we consider. Node Classification on Real-world Datasets The following software and hardware environments were used for all experiments: UBUNTU 18.04 LTS, PYTHON 3.9.12, PYTORCH 1.11.0, PYTORCH GEOMETRIC 2.0.4, TORCHDIFFEQ 0.2.3, NUMPY 1.22.4, SCIPY 1.8.1, MATPLOTLIB 2.2.3, CUDA 11.3, and NVIDIA Driver 465.19, and i9 CPU, and NVIDIA RTX 3090. We performed 10 repetitions on the train/valid/test splits taken from (Pei et al., 2020) and strictly followed their evaluation protocol. For all data sets, we used the largest connectivity component (LCC) except for Citeseer. We use the dropout only in the encoder network and the output layer. We refer to the dropout in the encoder as input dropout and the dropout in the output layer as dropout . GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks We fine-tune our model within the hyperparameter search space in Table 12. Our hyperparameter search used the method of W&B Sweeps (Biewald, 2020) with a standard random search with 500 counts. We introduce the best hyperparameter configuration in Tables 13 to 16. Table 10. Hyperparameter for the c SBM synthetic network Hyperparameters Value epochs 100 adjacency matrix OA α SC β VC learning rate 0.001 weight decay 5 10 4 dropout 0.0 input dropout 0.5 dim(H) 2 step size τ 1.0 time T 40 ODE solver Euler Table 11. Hyperparameter search space for the synthetic Cora network Hyperparameters Search Space epochs 100 adjacency matrix {OA, SA} α {SC, VC} β {SC, VC} learning rate {0.001, 0.002, 0.0025, 0.005, 0.01} weight decay {0.01, 0.001, 0.0005, 0.0001} dropout 0.35 input dropout 0.5 dim(H) 64 step size τ {0.1, 0.5, 1.0} time T {1, 2, 3, 4} ODE solver Euler Table 12. Hyperparameter search space for real-world datasets Hyperparameters Search Space epochs 200 adjacency matrix {OA, SA} α {SC, VC} β {SC, VC} learning rate [1 10 3, 6 10 2] weight decay [0, 3 10 2] dropout [0, 0.6] input dropout [0, 0.6] dim(H) {32, 64, 128, 256} step size τ [0.1, 1.5] time T [0.1, 6.0] ODE solver {Euler, RK4, DOPRI5} GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Table 13. Best hyperparameters of GREAD-BS Hyperparameters Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med adjacency matrix OA SA SA SA OA SA SA SA SA α SC SC VC SC VC VC VC SC VC β VC VC VC VC VC VC SC SC SC learning rate 0.0100 0.0154 0.0082 0.0079 0.0171 0.0068 0.0105 0.0024 0.0108 weight decay 0.0247 0.0090 0.0280 0.0014 0.0000 0.0000 0.0060 0.0146 0.0005 input dropout 0.47 0.54 0.49 0.42 0.52 0.68 0.53 0.50 0.36 dropout 0.48 0.48 0.32 0.65 0.09 0.05 0.45 0.47 0.26 dim(H) 128 256 128 64 256 256 64 128 64 step size τ 1.0 0.25 0.2 0.1 0.75 1.5 0.25 0.5 0.8 time T 1.46 0.75 0.12 0.31 5.70 1.71 3.49 2.35 1.74 ODE solver Euler RK4 RK4 RK4 Euler Euler RK4 RK4 RK4 Table 14. Best hyperparameters of GREAD-F Hyperparameters Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med adjacency matrix SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA α VC SC VC SC VC SC SC SC VC β VC VC VC VC VC VC SC VC VC learning rate 0.0113 0.0094 0.0092 0.0068 0.0054 0.0101 0.0048 0.0013 0.0120 weight decay 0.0079 0.0057 0.0263 0.0006 0.0011 0.0015 0.0370 0.0041 0.0003 input dropout 0.46 0.41 0.46 0.48 0.48 0.50 0.50 0.50 0.36 dropout 0.38 0.05 0.31 0.48 0.36 0.24 0.35 0.51 0.25 dim(H) 256 64 256 128 128 256 32 256 128 step size τ 1.0 0.1 1.0 0.75 1.0 1.0 0.2 0.9 1 time T 1.26 0.12 1.0 1.14 2.23 1.0 2.27 1.86 1.44 ODE solver Euler RK4 Euler RK4 Euler RK4 Euler RK4 RK4 Table 15. Best hyperparameters of GREAD-AC Hyperparameters Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med adjacency matrix SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA α VC VC SC SC SC SC SC SC VC β VC VC VC SC VC VC VC VC VC learning rate 0.0070 0.0083 0.0084 0.0027 0.0025 0.0038 0.0039 0.0029 0.0124 weight decay 0.0136 0.0081 0.0311 0.0001 0.0020 0.0007 0.0469 0.0140 0.0006 input dropout 0.40 0.45 0.49 0.46 0.52 0.52 0.40 0.47 0.30 dropout 0.30 0.20 0.29 0.48 0.28 0.35 0.40 0.49 0.26 dim(H) 256 128 128 128 128 256 128 64 128 step size τ 1.0 0.5 0.75 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.1 0.9 1.0 time T 1.36 0.20 0.18 1.06 1.98 2.0 3.52 2.78 1.65 ODE solver Euler RK4 RK4 Euler Euler RK4 Euler RK4 RK4 Table 16. Best hyperparameters of GREAD-Z Hyperparameters Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med adjacency matrix OA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA α VC SC SC SC VC VC VC VC VC β SC VC SC VC VC VC SC VC VC learning rate 0.0088 0.0046 0.0048 0.0023 0.0099 0.0111 0.0045 0.0027 0.0091 weight decay 0.0462 0.0086 0.0435 0.0011 0.0007 0.0012 0.0050 0.0145 0.0004 input dropout 0.48 0.45 0.4272 0.48 0.53 0.45 0.4 0.50 0.37 dropout 0.46 0.18 0.29 0.48 0.44 0.31 0.2 0.49 0.22 dim(H) 256 128 256 64 128 256 64 64 64 step size τ 1.2 0.4 0.2 0.2 1.0 1.0 0.1 0.8 0.8 time T 1.2 0.11 0.13 0.75 2.71 1.0 3.55 2.01 1.12 ODE solver RK4 RK4 RK4 RK4 RK4 RK4 RK4 RK4 RK4 GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks Table 17. Best hyperparameters of GREAD-ST Hyperparameters Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med adjacency matrix OA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA α SC SC SC SC VC VC SC SC SC β SC VC VC SC VC VC VC SC SC learning rate 0.0200 0.0180 0.0050 0.0081 0.0538 0.0077 0.0074 0.0038 0.0108 weight decay 0.0295 0.0082 0.0275 0.0013 0.0000 0.0000 0.0086 0.0042 0.0004 input dropout 0.46 0.54 0.47 0.42 0.61 0.65 0.37 0.49 0.36 dropout 0.50 0.50 0.25 0.56 0.95 0.09 0.41 0.54 0.22 dim(H) 126 256 256 64 256 256 128 64 64 step size τ 0.5 0.5 0.25 0.7 1.0 1.0 0.1 0.6 0.9 time T 1.02 0.1 0.20 0.15 3.54 1.0 3.04 2.37 1.28 ODE solver Euler RK4 RK4 RK4 Euler Euler RK4 RK4 RK4 Table 18. Best hyperparameters of GREAD-FB Hyperparameters Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med adjacency matrix OA SA SA SA SA SA SA OA SA α VC SC SC SC VC VC SC VC VC β SC VC VC VC VC VC VC SC VC learning rate 0.0016 0.0185 0.0050 0.0133 0.0090 0.0010 0.0064 0.0012 0.0102 weight decay 0.0055 0.0113 0.0283 0.0014 0.0000 0.0000 0.0091 0.0042 0.0004 input dropout 0.52 0.50 0.36 0.51 0.62 0.64 0.47 0.45 0.35 dropout 0.48 0.53 0.23 0.60 0.06 0.05 0.50 0.54 0.21 dim(H) 64 64 256 64 128 128 256 128 64 step size τ 1.5 0.7 1.0 0.6 0.25 0.25 0.5 0.6 0.2 time T 1.4 1.0 0.1 1.3 2.4 1.8 3.1 1.5 1.0 ODE solver Euler RK4 RK4 RK4 Euler Euler RK4 RK4 Euler Table 19. Best hyperparameters of GREAD-FB* Hyperparameters Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pub Med adjacency matrix OA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA α SC SC SC SC VC VC VC VC SC β VC VC SC VC VC VC VC SC VC learning rate 0.0194 0.0195 0.0072 0.0144 0.0055 0.0095 0.0097 0.0020 0.0166 weight decay 0.0113 0.0142 0.0169 0.0010 0.0000 0.0000 0.0090 0.0048 0.0005 input dropout 0.45 0.51 0.36 0.52 0.63 0.65 0.50 0.57 0.35 dropout 0.52 0.48 0.19 0.59 0.05 0.14 0.39 0.39 0.22 dim(H) 64 64 128 64 128 128 64 64 128 step size τ 1.5 1.0 0.1 0.8 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.9 1.0 time T 1.4 1.0 0.2 1.9 2.0 1.5 3.3 1.7 1.4 ODE solver Euler Euler Euler RK4 Euler Euler Euler RK4 RK4 GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks F. Additional Experimental Results on Real-world Datasets F.1. Ablation Studies Tables 20 to 21 show the results of our additional ablation studies in the remaining datasets that are not reported in our main paper. In Table 20, SA outperforms OA in all the datasets except for Texas and Wisconsin. In the case of Texas and Wisconsin, SA performs worse than OA from time to time. In Table 21, we compare two types of β. β can be either a scalar parameter (SC) or a learnable vector parameter (VC). In almost cases, it shows better performance when the type of β is VC. Table 20. Ablation study on soft adjacency matrix Dataset A GREAD-BS GREAD-F GREAD-AC GREAD-Z GREAD-ST GREAD-FB GREAD-FB* Texas OA 88.92 3.72 86.49 4.69 85.41 5.16 87.30 5.68 81.08 5.67 86.76 5.05 87.03 3.97 SA 85.41 2.76 89.73 4.49 85.95 2.65 86.49 3.20 80.00 6.23 84.41 4.22 85.14 5.57 Wisconsin OA 87.45 3.53 86.47 4.16 87.26 3.87 86.28 3.62 85.88 3.26 85.13 4.13 85.42 4.51 SA 89.41 3.30 86.47 4.84 85.69 5.04 86.29 4.32 86.67 3.01 87.65 3.17 88.04 1.63 Squirrel OA 47.03 1.31 37.85 1.11 38.07 1.71 38.43 1.37 41.56 1.74 49.88 1.44 49.21 1.95 SA 59.22 1.44 46.16 1.44 45.10 2.11 46.25 1.72 45.83 1.40 50.83 2.27 50.57 1.52 Chameleon OA 67.79 1.91 59.80 1.54 58.93 1.92 54.45 2.29 56.05 1.28 62.41 1.99 62.63 1.64 SA 71.38 1.31 65.20 1.65 65.09 1.08 62.70 2.30 62.30 1.99 66.05 1.21 65.83 1.10 Cora OA 87.34 1.34 86.72 1.17 86.88 1.09 86.90 1.02 87.77 1.35 88.01 1.34 87.67 1.14 SA 88.57 0.66 88.39 0.91 88.29 0.67 88.31 1.10 88.47 1.19 88.03 0.78 88.01 0.80 Citeseer OA 77.33 1.74 76.29 1.74 76.73 1.52 76.69 1.97 76.57 1.29 77.28 1.73 77.38 1.79 SA 77.60 1.81 77.40 1.54 77.38 1.53 77.39 1.73 77.25 1.47 77.09 1.73 77.42 1.93 Pubmed OA 89.98 0.38 87.99 0.41 88.31 0.44 88.83 0.37 87.87 0.33 89.96 0.33 89.58 0.39 SA 90.23 0.55 90.09 0.31 90.10 0.36 90.11 0.27 90.13 0.36 90.07 0.45 90.08 0.46 Table 21. Ablation study on β Dataset β GREAD-BS GREAD-F GREAD-AC GREAD-Z GREAD-ST GREAD-FB GREAD-FB* Cornell SC 85.14 5.57 85.41 6.75 85.41 6.96 84.60 6.17 85.95 6.60 85.65 6.21 84.16 6.02 VC 86.49 7.15 86.49 5.13 87.03 4.95 85.68 5.41 86.22 5.98 86.22 5.85 85.95 5.64 Film SC 37.09 1.15 36.53 1.04 37.21 1.10 37.01 1.11 37.66 0.90 35.07 0.92 34.24 1.21 VC 37.90 1.17 37.20 1.26 36.76 0.99 36.70 0.69 37.33 1.35 37.40 0.55 37.70 0.51 Squirrel SC 42.74 1.34 44.88 1.62 39.61 1.69 40.33 2.06 43.41 1.61 40.59 1.14 40.15 1.66 VC 59.22 1.44 46.16 1.44 45.10 2.11 46.25 1.72 45.83 1.40 50.83 2.27 50.57 1.52 Chameleon SC 62.02 1.86 61.80 1.80 56.56 2.28 59.17 1.26 60.70 1.40 57.57 1.83 57.70 2.11 VC 71.38 1.31 65.20 1.65 65.09 1.08 62.70 2.30 62.30 1.99 66.05 1.21 65.83 1.10 Cora SC 87.45 1.08 88.07 0.96 88.01 0.85 88.13 0.40 88.35 1.32 87.75 1.24 86.68 0.88 VC 88.57 0.66 88.39 0.91 88.29 0.67 88.31 1.10 88.47 1.19 88.03 0.78 88.01 0.80 Citeseer SC 76.73 1.73 76.70 1.75 75.83 1.36 76.83 1.16 77.25 1.47 77.28 1.73 77.42 1.93 VC 77.60 1.81 77.40 1.54 77.38 1.53 77.39 1.73 77.13 2.20 77.22 2.13 77.23 1.89 Pubmed SC 89.96 0.42 87.51 0.44 88.76 0.45 90.04 0.26 90.13 0.36 89.90 0.47 89.99 0.24 VC 90.23 0.55 90.09 0.31 90.10 0.36 90.11 0.27 90.10 0.41 90.07 0.45 90.08 0.46 GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks F.2. Sensitivity Analyses In Figs. 7 and 8, we show the findings of our sensitivity studies in the remaining datasets that are not disclosed in our main manuscript. GREAD-BS maintains performance even when T is increased, but GREAD-Z tends to show low performance in Texas, Cornell, and Film. GREAD-BS GREAD-ST GREAD-F GREAD-FB GREAD-AC GREAD-FB* GREAD-Z 1.0 1.5 2.0 Time Test accuracy 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 Time Test accuracy (b) Wisconsin 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 Time Test accuracy (c) Cornell 1.0 1.5 2.0 Time Test accuracy 2 3 4 5 Time Test accuracy (e) Squirrel 1.0 1.5 2.0 Time Test accuracy (f) Chameleon 3.0 3.5 4.0 Time Test accuracy 1.0 1.5 2.0 Time Test accuracy (h) Citeseer 1.0 1.5 2.0 Time Test accuracy Figure 7. Sensitivity to T GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks GREAD-BS GREAD-ST GREAD-F GREAD-FB GREAD-AC GREAD-FB* GREAD-Z 0.2 0.5 1.0 1.25 1.5 Step size Test accuracy 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 Step size Test accuracy (b) Wisconsin 0.2 0.25 0.5 0.75 1.0 Test accuracy (c) Cornell 0.1 0.25 0.5 0.75 1.0 Test accuracy 0.1 0.25 0.5 0.75 1.0 Test accuracy (e) Squirrel 0.1 0.25 0.5 0.75 1.0 Test accuracy (f) Chameleon 0.1 0.2 0.25 0.5 1.0 Step size Test accuracy 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Step size Test accuracy (h) Citeseer 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Step size Test accuracy Figure 8. Sensitivity to step size GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks F.3. Training Time We present the training time of GREAD and some selected baselines in Fig. 9. In general, our method s training time is little larger than those of the existing baselines because GREAD has an additional operation in its reaction term. 32 64 128 256 dim(H) Runtime (ms) GRAND BLEND GREAD-BS GREAD-F GREAD-AC GREAD-Z GREAD-ST GREAD-FB GREAD-FB* 32 64 128 256 dim(H) Runtime (ms) GRAND BLEND GREAD-BS GREAD-F GREAD-AC GREAD-Z GREAD-ST GREAD-FB GREAD-FB* Figure 9. Average running time per epoch (ms) on Cora dataset when T = 3, τ = 1.0, SC, and OA. F.4. Visualizations In order to show the effectiveness of our proposed model more intuitively, we further conduct visualization tasks for all datasets. We extract the output vector in the final layer of GREAD and visualize those vectors using t-SNE. Fig. 10 shows the visualization results on each dataset. Different colors mean different ground-truth classes. GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks (b) Wisconsin (c) Cornell (e) Squirrel (f) Chameleon (h) Citeseer Figure 10. Visualization of networks GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks G. Additional Experimental Results on Synthetic Datasets G.1. Ablation Studies on β We perform the ablation study on β from the perspective of the Dirichlet energy. β can be either a scalar parameter (SC) or a learnable vector parameter (VC). In Fig. 11, we show the evolution of the Dirichlet energy on the synthetic random graph created from c SBM (Deshpande et al., 2018), and compare SC and VC for our proposed method. In the case of GREAD-F, GREAD-AC, GREAD-ST, and GREAD-FB, VC conserves more energy than SC, so the reaction term multiplied with β successfully mitigates the oversmoothing problem. 0 20 40 Time (Layers) Dirichlet energy β (SC) β (VC) (a) GREAD-BS 0 20 40 Time (Layers) Dirichlet energy β (SC) β (VC) (b) GREAD-F 0 20 40 Time (Layers) Dirichlet energy β (SC) β (VC) (c) GREAD-AC 0 20 40 Time (Layers) Dirichlet energy β (SC) β (VC) (d) GREAD-Z 0 20 40 Time (Layers) Dirichlet energy β (SC) β (VC) (e) GREAD-ST 0 20 40 Time (Layers) Dirichlet energy β (SC) β (VC) (f) GREAD-FB 0 20 40 Time (Layers) Dirichlet energy β (SC) β (VC) (g) GREAD-FB* Figure 11. Evolution of the Dirichlet energy on the synthetic random graph. The Y-axis is the logarithmic Dirichlet energy in each layer s output given a GNN of 40 layers. The gray area is the Dirichlet energy difference between SC and VC. GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks H. Comparison with GRAND++ and GREAD-ST The structures of GREAD-ST and GRAND++ are similar to each other since they commonly use a source term to alleviate the oversmoothing problem. However, there exists a key difference. First, GRAND++ is written as follows: f(H(t))GRAND++ := LH(t) + C(0), (20) where C(0) is a subset of H(0), which consists of only trustworthy nodes. On the other hand, the formula of GREAD-ST is written as follows: f(H(t))GREAD-ST := α( LH(t)) + β(C(0)). (21) In our GREAD-ST, the full source term H(0) is added to the reaction term. After that, β, a learnable parameter, determines how much the source term is added. In other words, GREAD-ST learns how to utilize H(0) in the reaction term. We compare GRAND++ (Thorpe et al., 2022) and GREAD-ST through experiments using the benchmark dataset in Table 22. GREAD-ST shows superiority in all datasets. In Table 23, we also show the performance by varying the number of layers for Cora. Our method is more robust to the oversmoothing problem than GRAND++. Table 22. Comparison with GRAND++ and GREAD-ST Model Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pubmed GRAND++ 77.57 5.00 82.75 4.19 81.89 5.28 33.63 0.48 40.06 1.70 56.20 2.15 88.15 1.22 76.57 1.46 88.50 0.35 GREAD-ST 81.08 5.67 86.67 3.01 86.22 5.98 37.66 0.90 45.83 1.40 63.03 1.32 88.47 1.19 77.25 1.47 90.13 0.36 Table 23. Classification accuracy of GRAND++ and GREAD-ST with different depths on Cora dataset Dataset Model Layer 2 4 8 16 32 64 Cora GRAND++ 87.38 2.01 88.15 1.22 87.89 1.13 87.73 0.96 87.52 1.28 87.73 1.30 GREAD-ST 88.17 0.38 88.31 0.39 88.39 0.83 88.12 0.53 88.47 1.19 88.37 0.98 I. Well-posedness of GREAD The well-posedness1 of NODEs was already proved in Lyons et al. (2004, Theorem 1.3) under the mild condition of the Lipschitz continuity. Almost all activations, such as Re LU, Leaky Re LU, Soft Plus, Tanh, Sigmoid, Arc Tan, and Softsign, have a Lipschitz constant of 1. Other common neural network layers, such as dropout, batch normalization, and other pooling methods, have explicit Lipschitz constant values. Therefore, the Lipschitz continuity of f can be fulfilled in some cases of GREAD, making the initial value problem in Eq. (7) a well-posed problem. However, some other functions are locally Lipschitz continuous. For instance, GREAD with the soft adjacency matrix does not satisfy the globally Lipschitz continuous property. Nevertheless, our experimental results show that GREAD can be properly trained and outperforms many baselines. 1A well-posed problem means i) its solution uniquely exists, and ii) its solution continuously changes as input data changes. GREAD: Graph Neural Reaction-Diffusion Networks J. Statistical Testing on Cora Dataset For proper statistical testing, we experiment more with 10 different seeds per split and perform statistical tests using a total of 100 experimental results. The unpaired t-test of GRAND and GREAD-BS is shown in Table 24. As shown, GREAD-BS has a clear improvement in all datasets compared to GRAND. Table 24. Significance test between GRAND and GRAND-BS utilizing unpaired t-test Texas Wisconsin Cornell Film Squirrel Chameleon Cora Citeseer Pubmed GRAND 76.10 6.03 79.19 5.26 82.17 5.99 33.43 1.29 38.09 1.38 53.86 2.04 87.12 1.74 76.11 1.24 88.82 0.50 GREAD-BS 88.71 3.24 89.10 2.90 86.44 7.03 39.90 1.02 58.89 1.11 70.04 0.93 88.43 0.59 77.48 1.15 90.03 0.49 t-statistic 18.42 16.50 4.62 39.34 117.45 72.17 7.13 8.10 17.28 p-value <0.05 <0.05 <0.05 <0.05 <0.05 <0.05 <0.05 <0.05 <0.05