# Graph Neural Networks with Diverse Spectral Filtering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Pitfalls of Graph Neural Network Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05868/) (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)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [On the Bottleneck of Graph Neural Networks and its Practical Implications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05205/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07988/) (2020)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks with Learnable Structural and Positional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07875/) (2021)
- [Improving Graph Neural Network Expressivity via Subgraph Isomorphism Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09252/) (2020)
- [BernNet: Learning Arbitrary Graph Spectral Filters via Bernstein Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10994/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks with convolutional ARMA filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01343/) (2019)
- [How Much Position Information Do Convolutional Neural Networks Encode?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08248/) (2020)
- [How Powerful are Spectral Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11172/) (2022)
- [Interpreting and Unifying Graph Neural Networks with An Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11859/) (2021)
- [Position Information in Transformers: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11090/) (2021)
- [Breaking the Limits of Message Passing Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04319/) (2021)
- [Breaking the Limit of Graph Neural Networks by Improving the Assortativity of Graphs with Local Mixing Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06586/) (2021)
- [Equivariant and Stable Positional Encoding for More Powerful Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00199/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [PolyFormer: Scalable Node-wise Filters via Polynomial Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14459/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Spectral Graph Neural Networks with Spatially Adaptive Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09071/) (2024)
- [Graph Neural Networks Are More Than Filters: Revisiting and Benchmarking from A Spectral Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07188/) (2024)
- [Piecewise Constant Spectral Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04808/) (2025)
- [Graph Neural Network-based Spectral Filtering Mechanism for Imbalance Classification in Network Digital Twin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11505/) (2025)
- [GCN-MPPR: Enhancing the Propagation of Message Passing Neural Networks via Motif-Based Personalized PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07903/) (2026)
- [Frequency-Corrupt Based Graph Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15699/) (2026)
- [Inductive Subgraphs as Shortcuts: Causal Disentanglement for Heterophilic Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19186/) (2026)
- [Gate the Filter, Not the Message: Node-Channel Mixtures for Pre-Propagation GNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01660/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spectral Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in graph machine learning, with polynomial filters applied for graph convolutions, where all nodes share the identical filter weights to mine their local contexts. Despite the success, existing spectral GNNs usually fail to deal with complex networks (e.g., WWW) due to such homogeneous spectral filtering setting that ignores the regional heterogeneity as typically seen in real-world networks. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel diverse spectral filtering (DSF) framework, which automatically learns node-specific filter weights to exploit the varying local structure properly. Particularly, the diverse filter weights consist of two components -- A global one shared among all nodes, and a local one that varies along network edges to reflect node difference arising from distinct graph parts -- to balance between local and global information. As such, not only can the global graph characteristics be captured, but also the diverse local patterns can be mined with awareness of different node positions. Interestingly, we formulate a novel optimization problem to assist in learning diverse filters, which also enables us to enhance any spectral GNNs with our DSF framework. We showcase the proposed framework on three state-of-the-arts including GPR-GNN, BernNet, and JacobiConv. Extensive experiments over 10 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework can consistently boost model performance by up to 4.92% in node classification tasks, producing diverse filters with enhanced interpretability. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/jingweio/DSF.