Sheaf Graph Neural Networks via PAC-Bayes Spectral Optimization
This addresses a key limitation in GNNs for node classification on graphs with dissimilar adjacent nodes, offering improved generalization and stability.
The paper tackles over-smoothing in Graph Neural Networks on heterophilic graphs by introducing SGPC, a sheaf-based architecture with PAC-Bayes spectral optimization, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods on nine benchmarks and provides certified confidence intervals.
Over-smoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) causes collapse in distinct node features, particularly on heterophilic graphs where adjacent nodes often have dissimilar labels. Although sheaf neural networks partially mitigate this problem, they typically rely on static or heavily parameterized sheaf structures that hinder generalization and scalability. Existing sheaf-based models either predefine restriction maps or introduce excessive complexity, yet fail to provide rigorous stability guarantees. In this paper, we introduce a novel scheme called SGPC (Sheaf GNNs with PAC-Bayes Calibration), a unified architecture that combines cellular-sheaf message passing with several mechanisms, including optimal transport-based lifting, variance-reduced diffusion, and PAC-Bayes spectral regularization for robust semi-supervised node classification. We establish performance bounds theoretically and demonstrate that end-to-end training in linear computational complexity can achieve the resulting bound-aware objective. Experiments on nine homophilic and heterophilic benchmarks show that SGPC outperforms state-of-the-art spectral and sheaf-based GNNs while providing certified confidence intervals on unseen nodes. The code and proofs are in https://github.com/ChoiYoonHyuk/SGPC.