Scattering GCN: Overcoming Oversmoothness in Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have shown promising results in processing graph data by extracting structure-aware features. This gave rise to extensive work in geometric deep learning, focusing on designing network architectures that ensure neuron activations conform to regularity patterns within the input graph. However, in most cases the graph structure is only accounted for by considering the similarity of activations between adjacent nodes, which in turn degrades the results. In this work, we augment GCN models by incorporating richer notions of regularity by leveraging cascades of band-pass filters, known as geometric scatterings. The produced graph features incorporate multiscale representations of local graph structures, while avoiding overly smooth activations forced by previous architectures. Moreover, inspired by skip connections used in residual networks, we introduce graph residual convolutions that reduce high-frequency noise caused by joining together information at multiple scales. Our hybrid architecture introduces a new model for semi-supervised learning on graph-structured data, and its potential is demonstrated for node classification tasks on multiple graph datasets, where it outperforms leading GCN models.