{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/2408-00165","title":"Non-convolutional Graph Neural Networks","arxiv_id":"2408.00165","date":"2024-07-31","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yuanqing Wang","Kyunghyun Cho"],"abstract":"Rethink convolution-based graph neural networks (GNN) -- they characteristically suffer from limited expressiveness, over-smoothing, and over-squashing, and require specialized sparse kernels for efficient computation. Here, we design a simple graph learning module entirely free of convolution operators, coined random walk with unifying memory (RUM) neural network, where an RNN merges the topological and semantic graph features along the random walks terminating at each node. Relating the rich literature on RNN behavior and graph topology, we theoretically show and experimentally verify that RUM attenuates the aforementioned symptoms and is more expressive than the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) isomorphism test. On a variety of node- and graph-level classification and regression tasks, RUM not only achieves competitive performance, but is also robust, memory-efficient, scalable, and faster than the simplest convolutional GNNs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00165v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.00165v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"2408-00165","repo_url":"https://github.com/yuanqing-wang/rum","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"graph-learning","task_name":"Graph Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2408.00165","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2408.00165"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/yuanqing-wang/rum","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"eb4f8373dd9d45e6","entry":"uniqueness","repo":"yuanqing-wang/rum","repo_kind":"official","path":"rum/random_walk.py","file_url":"https://github.com/yuanqing-wang/rum/blob/HEAD/rum/random_walk.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"eb4f8373dd9d45e6"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}