# Aggregation-aware MLP: An Unsupervised Approach for Graph Message-passing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20127 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20127/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [A critical look at the evaluation of GNNs under heterophily: Are we really making progress?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11640/) (2023)
- [Two Sides of the Same Coin: Heterophily and Oversmoothing in Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06462/) (2021)
- [Finding Global Homophily in Graph Neural Networks When Meeting Heterophily](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07308/) (2022)
- [Attributed Graph Clustering: A Deep Attentional Embedding Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06532/) (2019)
- [Identifying and Correcting Label Bias in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04966/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Clustering via Dual Correlation Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14772/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Graph Encoder for Attributed Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01594/) (2020)
- [Learning Graph Embedding with Adversarial Training Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01250/) (2019)
- [Multi-view Contrastive Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11842/) (2021)
- [ProGCL: Rethinking Hard Negative Mining in Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02027/) (2021)
- [Deep Fusion Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09600/) (2020)
- [Cluster-guided Contrastive Graph Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01098/) (2023)
- [Simple Contrastive Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07865/) (2022)
- [Dink-Net: Neural Clustering on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18405/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Graph Auto-Encoder Models for Attributed Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08562/) (2021)
- [Block Modeling-Guided Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13507/) (2021)
- [Beyond Homophily: Reconstructing Structure for Graph-agnostic Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02931/) (2023)
- [PC-Conv: Unifying Homophily and Heterophily with Two-fold Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14438/) (2023)
- [Graph Pointer Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00973/) (2021)
- [EvenNet: Ignoring Odd-Hop Neighbors Improves Robustness of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13892/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a dominant approach to learning graph representations, primarily because of their message-passing mechanisms. However, GNNs typically adopt a fixed aggregator function such as Mean, Max, or Sum without principled reasoning behind the selection. This rigidity, especially in the presence of heterophily, often leads to poor, problem dependent performance. Although some attempts address this by designing more sophisticated aggregation functions, these methods tend to rely heavily on labeled data, which is often scarce in real-world tasks. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised framework, "Aggregation-aware Multilayer Perceptron" (AMLP), which shifts the paradigm from directly crafting aggregation functions to making MLP adaptive to aggregation. Our lightweight approach consists of two key steps: First, we utilize a graph reconstruction method that facilitates high-order grouping effects, and second, we employ a single-layer network to encode varying degrees of heterophily, thereby improving the capacity and applicability of the model. Extensive experiments on node clustering and classification demonstrate the superior performance of AMLP, highlighting its potential for diverse graph learning scenarios.