Gate the Filter, Not the Message: Node-Channel Mixtures for Pre-Propagation GNNs
For practitioners of scalable graph learning, this work provides a robust, dataset-agnostic alternative to manual hop-aggregator selection.
Pre-propagation GNNs (PPGNNs) suffer from inconsistent performance of hop aggregators; the authors identify that existing designs differ in filter coefficient sharing patterns and propose FilterMoE, a mixture-of-experts model with joint node-channel routing. FilterMoE outperforms strong PPGNN baselines on nine of eleven benchmarks, improving average test score by 1.53 points.
Pre-propagation graph neural networks (PPGNNs) push all graph-dependent computation into a preprocessing step and train only on the resulting dense hop features, which makes them highly scalable. A puzzle in this regime is that more complex hop aggregators do not reliably outperform simpler ones: on many benchmarks, a plain MLP-based aggregator matches or beats hop-attention variants. We revisit this behavior from a graph-filter perspective. Over a precomputed diffusion basis, existing PPGNNs differ mainly in how filter coefficients are shared across nodes and feature channels, rather than simply in raw aggregator capacity. MLP-based architectures learn channel-dependent filters that are largely shared across nodes, while hop-attention-based architectures learn node-dependent mixtures that are largely shared across channels. This reveals a missing regime in standard PPGNN designs: joint node- and channel-adaptive filtering under the pre-propagation computational contract. We propose FilterMoE, a mixture-of-experts PPGNN in which a small bank of learnable Chebyshev filter experts is routed jointly over nodes and channels by a 3D gating tensor. Across eleven homophilic and heterophilic benchmarks, FilterMoE outperforms strong PPGNN baselines on nine datasets and ranks first on all three large-scale benchmarks, improving the average test score by 1.53 points. These results establish joint node-channel filter routing as a robust alternative to dataset-specific hop-aggregator selection.