# Overcoming Oversmoothness in Graph Convolutional Networks via Hybrid Scattering Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [MoleculeNet: A Benchmark for Molecular Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00564/) (2017)
- [Geometric deep learning: going beyond Euclidean data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08097/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [How Attentive are Graph Attention Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14491/) (2021)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [MixHop: Higher-Order Graph Convolutional Architectures via Sparsified Neighborhood Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00067/) (2019)
- [MolGAN: An implicit generative model for small molecular graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11973/) (2018)
- [Deep Gaussian Embedding of Graphs: Unsupervised Inductive Learning via Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03815/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Graph Neural Networks: All We Have is Low-Pass Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09550/) (2019)
- [Wiki-CS: A Wikipedia-Based Benchmark for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02901/) (2020)
- [Order Matters: Sequence to sequence for sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06391/) (2015)
- [CayleyNets: Graph Convolutional Neural Networks with Complex Rational Spectral Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07664/) (2017)
- [Graph Wavelet Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07785/) (2019)
- [Unifying Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and Label Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06755/) (2020)
- [Transferability of Spectral Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12972/) (2019)
- [LanczosNet: Multi-Scale Deep Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01484/) (2019)
- [Scattering GCN: Overcoming Oversmoothness in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08414/) (2020)
- [Geometric Scattering for Graph Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03068/) (2018)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks via Scattering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00099/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Unsupervised Learning for Solving the Travelling Salesman Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10538/) (2023)
- [Can Hybrid Geometric Scattering Networks Help Solve the Maximum Clique Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01506/) (2022)
- [Geometric Scattering on Measure Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08561/) (2022)
- [From Local to Global: Spectral-Inspired Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12054/) (2022)
- [The Manifold Scattering Transform for High-Dimensional Point Cloud Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10078/) (2022)
- [Learnable Filters for Geometric Scattering Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07458/) (2022)
- [E(n)-equivariant Graph Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10497/) (2023)
- [TxPert: Leveraging Biochemical Relationships for Out-of-Distribution Transcriptomic Perturbation Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14919/) (2025)
- [DYMAG: Rethinking Message Passing Using Dynamical-systems-based Waveforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09924/) (2023)
- [BLIS-Net: Classifying and Analyzing Signals on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17579/) (2023)
- [Manifold Filter-Combine Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04056/) (2023)
- [Directed Scattering for Knowledge Graph-based Cellular Signaling Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07813/) (2023)
- [HiPoNet: A Multi-View Simplicial Complex Network for High Dimensional Point-Cloud and Single-Cell Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07746/) (2025)
- [Iteratively Refined Early Interaction Alignment for Subgraph Matching based Graph Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22538/) (2025)
- [VDW-GNNs: Vector diffusion wavelets for geometric graph neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01022/) (2025)
- [Convergence of Manifold Filter-Combine Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14639/) (2024)
- [ProtScape: A molecular structure and energy-aware representation for protein conformation generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20317/) (2024)
- [InfoGain Wavelets: Furthering the Design of Graph Diffusion Wavelets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08802/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Geometric deep learning has made great strides towards generalizing the design of structure-aware neural networks from traditional domains to non-Euclidean ones, giving rise to graph neural networks (GNN) that can be applied to graph-structured data arising in, e.g., social networks, biochemistry, and material science. Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) in particular, inspired by their Euclidean counterparts, have been successful in processing graph data by extracting structure-aware features. However, current GNN models are often constrained by various phenomena that limit their expressive power and ability to generalize to more complex graph datasets. Most models essentially rely on low-pass filtering of graph signals via local averaging operations, leading to oversmoothing. Moreover, to avoid severe oversmoothing, most popular GCN-style networks tend to be shallow, with narrow receptive fields, leading to underreaching. Here, we propose a hybrid GNN framework that combines traditional GCN filters with band-pass filters defined via geometric scattering. We further introduce an attention framework that allows the model to locally attend over combined information from different filters at the node level. Our theoretical results establish the complementary benefits of the scattering filters to leverage structural information from the graph, while our experiments show the benefits of our method on various learning tasks.