HOPPER: Learnable Hop Extraction for Linearized Graph Sequence Models

Graph neural networks typically propagate information through repeated message-passing layers, coupling propagation distance with the number of nonlinear transformations applied. This coupling can make deep architectures difficult to optimize and lead to over-smoothing, over-squashing, and loss of long-range information. Linearized Graph Sequence Models (LGSMs) address this issue by separating propagation depth from processing depth and representing successive propagation states of each node as a sequence. However, existing LGSMs construct these sequences using fixed graph operators, limiting their ability to adapt propagation to the input graph, node features, and downstream task. We introduce HOPPER, an end-to-end learnable extension of LGSM that learns how hop sequences should be extracted before processing by a modern state-space model. HOPPER supports feature-conditioned, structure-aware, graph and hop-adaptive propagation while preserving permutation equivariance, with standard adjacency-based and non-backtracking LGSM sequences arising as special cases of the extractor family. HOPPER is state-of-the-art or competitive across ECHO-Synth and performs strongly on City-Networks. On the LRIM physics-based long-range dependency benchmark, varying the maximum neighborhood size used for message-backtracking cancellation, corresponding to the structural memory window, substantially affects performance. Ablations further isolate the contributions of the learnable extraction mechanism and its structural and feature-adaptive components, showing that adaptive hop-sequence construction provides gains beyond the downstream sequence model alone. Together, these results demonstrate that learnable sequence extraction is a flexible and effective framework for long-range graph representation learning across synthetic, physics-based and real-world graph benchmarks.