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Towards quantifying long-range interactions in graph machine learning: a large graph dataset and a measurement

Abstract:

Long-range dependencies are critical for effective graph representation learning, yet most existing datasets focus on small graphs tailored to inductive tasks, offering limited insight into long-range interactions. Current evaluations primarily compare models employing global attention (e.g., graph transformers) with those using local neighborhood aggregation (e.g., message-passing neural networks) without a direct measurement of long-range dependency. In this work, we introduce City-Networks, a novel large-scale transductive learning dataset derived from real-world city road networks. This dataset features graphs with over 105 nodes and significantly larger diameters than those in existing benchmarks, naturally embodying long-range information. We annotate the graphs based on local node eccentricities, ensuring that the classification task inherently requires information from distant nodes. Furthermore, we propose a generic measurement based on the Jacobians of neighbors from distant hops, offering a principled quantification of long-range dependencies. Finally, we provide theoretical justifications for both our dataset design and the proposed measurement—particularly by focusing on over-smoothing and influence score dilution—which establishes a robust foundation for further exploration of long-range interactions in graph neural networks.

Publication status:
Accepted
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publication website:
https://openreview.net/forum?id=fylMiUmg39

Authors

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Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Engineering Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Engineering Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Engineering Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Engineering Science
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Engineering Science
Oxford college:
Lady Margaret Hall
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0002-1143-9786


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Funder identifier:
https://ror.org/03n0ht308
Grant:
2884089


Publisher:
OpenReview
Host title:
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
Article number:
6143
Acceptance date:
2026-01-26
Event title:
14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
Event location:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Event website:
https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2026
Event start date:
2026-04-23
Event end date:
2026-04-27


Language:
English
Pubs id:
2426912
Local pid:
pubs:2426912
Deposit date:
2026-05-30
ARK identifier:

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