Spectral GNN via Two-dimensional (2-D) Graph Convolution

Abstract

Spectral Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in graph learning. As an essential part of spectral GNNs, spectral graph convolution extracts crucial frequency information in graph data, leading to superior performance of spectral GNNs in downstream tasks. However, in this paper, we show that existing spectral GNNs remain critical drawbacks in performing the spectral graph convolution. Specifically, considering the spectral graph convolution as a construction operation towards target output, we prove that existing popular convolution paradigms cannot construct the target output with mild conditions on input graph signals, causing spectral GNNs to fall into suboptimal solutions. To address the issues, we rethink the spectral graph convolution from a more general two-dimensional (2-D) signal convolution perspective and propose a new convolution paradigm, named 2-D graph convolution. We prove that 2-D graph convolution unifies existing graph convolution paradigms, and is capable to construct arbitrary target output. Based on the proposed 2-D graph convolution, we further propose ChebNet2D, an efficient and effective GNN implementation of 2-D graph convolution through applying Chebyshev interpolation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate both effectiveness and efficiency of the ChebNet2D.