Generalizing Graph Neural Networks Beyond Homophily

We investigate the representation power of graph neural networks in the semi-supervised node classification task under heterophily or low homophily, i.e., in networks where connected nodes may have different class labels and dissimilar features. Most existing GNNs fail to generalize to this setting, and are even outperformed by models that ignore the graph structure (e.g., multilayer perceptrons). Motivated by this limitation, we identify a set of key designs -- ego- and neighbor-embedding separation, higher-order neighborhoods, and combination of intermediate representations -- that boost learning from the graph structure under heterophily, and combine them into a new graph convolutional neural network, H2GCN. Going beyond the traditional benchmarks with strong homophily, our empirical analysis on synthetic and real networks shows that, thanks to the identified designs, H2GCN has consistently strong performance across the full spectrum of low-to-high homophily, unlike competitive prior models without them.