Fundamental Limits of Crystalline Equivariant Graph Neural Networks: A Circuit Complexity Perspective

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a core paradigm for learning on relational data. In materials science, equivariant GNNs (EGNNs) have emerged as a compelling backbone for crystalline-structure prediction, owing to their ability to respect Euclidean symmetries and periodic boundary conditions. Despite strong empirical performance, their expressive power in periodic, symmetry-constrained settings remains poorly understood. This work characterizes the intrinsic computational and expressive limits of EGNNs for crystalline-structure prediction through a circuit-complexity lens. We analyze the computations carried out by EGNN layers acting on node features, atomic coordinates, and lattice matrices, and prove that, under polynomial precision, embedding width d=O(n) for n nodes, O(1) layers, and O(1)-depth, O(n)-width MLP instantiations of the message/update/readout maps, these models admit a simulation by a uniform mathsfTC0 threshold-circuit family of polynomial size (with an explicit constant-depth bound). Situating EGNNs within mathsfTC0 provides a concrete ceiling on the decision and prediction problems solvable by such architectures under realistic resource constraints and clarifies which architectural modifications (e.g., increased depth, richer geometric primitives, or wider layers) are required to transcend this regime. The analysis complements Weisfeiler-Lehman style results that do not directly transfer to periodic crystals, and offers a complexity-theoretic foundation for symmetry-aware graph learning on crystalline systems.