# Incorporating Heterophily into Graph Neural Networks for Graph Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.07678 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07678/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Predict then Propagate: Graph Neural Networks meet Personalized PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05997/) (2018)
- [Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02244/) (2018)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs with Jumping Knowledge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03536/) (2018)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00982/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07988/) (2020)
- [Learning Combinatorial Optimization Algorithms over Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01665/) (2017)
- [Provably Powerful Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11136/) (2019)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [Invariant and Equivariant Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09902/) (2018)
- [OGB-LSC: A Large-Scale Challenge for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09430/) (2021)
- [Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05273/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02901/) (2017)
- [Diffusion-Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02136/) (2015)
- [Revisiting Graph Neural Networks: All We Have is Low-Pass Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09550/) (2019)
- [GRAND: Graph Neural Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10934/) (2021)
- [A Fair Comparison of Graph Neural Networks for Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09893/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [The Heterophilic Graph Learning Handbook: Benchmarks, Models, Theoretical Analysis, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09618/) (2024)
- [Transfer Entropy in Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06632/) (2024)
- [Preference-driven Knowledge Distillation for Few-shot Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10116/) (2025)
- [Flexible Infinite-Width Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06525/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often assume strong homophily for graph classification, seldom considering heterophily, which means connected nodes tend to have different class labels and dissimilar features. In real-world scenarios, graphs may have nodes that exhibit both homophily and heterophily. Failing to generalize to this setting makes many GNNs underperform in graph classification. In this paper, we address this limitation by identifying three effective designs and develop a novel GNN architecture called IHGNN (short for Incorporating Heterophily into Graph Neural Networks). These designs include the combination of integration and separation of the ego- and neighbor-embeddings of nodes, adaptive aggregation of node embeddings from different layers, and differentiation between different node embeddings for constructing the graph-level readout function. We empirically validate IHGNN on various graph datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs for graph classification.