Transforming PageRank into an Infinite-Depth Graph Neural Network

Popular graph neural networks are shallow models, despite the success of very deep architectures in other application domains of deep learning. This reduces the modeling capacity and leaves models unable to capture long-range relationships. The primary reason for the shallow design results from over-smoothing, which leads node states to become more similar with increased depth. We build on the close connection between GNNs and PageRank, for which personalized PageRank introduces the consideration of a personalization vector. Adopting this idea, we propose the Personalized PageRank Graph Neural Network (PPRGNN), which extends the graph convolutional network to an infinite-depth model that has a chance to reset the neighbor aggregation back to the initial state in each iteration. We introduce a nicely interpretable tweak to the chance of resetting and prove the convergence of our approach to a unique solution without placing any constraints, even when taking infinitely many neighbor aggregations. As in personalized PageRank, our result does not suffer from over-smoothing. While doing so, time complexity remains linear while we keep memory complexity constant, independently of the depth of the network, making it scale well to large graphs. We empirically show the effectiveness of our approach for various node and graph classification tasks. PPRGNN outperforms comparable methods in almost all cases.