# Disambiguated Node Classification with Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08824 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08824/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Pitfalls of Graph Neural Network Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05868/) (2018)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07243/) (2019)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07988/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [MixHop: Higher-Order Graph Convolutional Architectures via Sparsified Neighborhood Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00067/) (2019)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [Keystroke Dynamics as Part of Lifelogging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10144/) (2020)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [BernNet: Learning Arbitrary Graph Spectral Filters via Bernstein Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10994/) (2021)
- [Two Sides of the Same Coin: Heterophily and Oversmoothing in Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06462/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Graphs with Heterophily: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07082/) (2022)
- [GraphSMOTE: Imbalanced Node Classification on Graphs with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08826/) (2021)

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

- [Curriculum Guided Personalized Subgraph Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00402/) (2025)
- [Language Models as Messengers: Enhancing Message Passing in Heterophilic Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19762/) (2025)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Backdoor Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00191/) (2025)
- [Gumbel-MPNN: Graph Rewiring with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17531/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated significant success in learning from graph-structured data across various domains. Despite their great successful, one critical challenge is often overlooked by existing works, i.e., the learning of message propagation that can generalize effectively to underrepresented graph regions. These minority regions often exhibit irregular homophily/heterophily patterns and diverse neighborhood class distributions, resulting in ambiguity. In this work, we investigate the ambiguity problem within GNNs, its impact on representation learning, and the development of richer supervision signals to fight against this problem. We conduct a fine-grained evaluation of GNN, analyzing the existence of ambiguity in different graph regions and its relation with node positions. To disambiguate node embeddings, we propose a novel method, method, which exploits additional optimization guidance to enhance representation learning, particularly for nodes in ambiguous regions. method identifies ambiguous nodes based on temporal inconsistency of predictions and introduces a disambiguation regularization by employing contrastive learning in a topology-aware manner. method promotes discriminativity of node representations and can alleviating semantic mixing caused by message propagation, effectively addressing the ambiguity problem. Empirical results validate the efficiency of method and highlight its potential to improve GNN performance in underrepresented graph regions.
