{"doi":"10.3390/electronics14051047","title":"Efficient Graph Representation Learning by Non-Local Information Exchange","abstract":"Graphs are an effective data structure for characterizing ubiquitous connections as well as evolving behaviors that emerge in inter-wined systems. Limited by the stereotype of node-to-node connections, learning node representations is often confined in a graph diffusion process where local information has been excessively aggregated, as the random walk of graph neural networks (GNN) explores far-reaching neighborhoods layer-by-layer. In this regard, tremendous efforts have been made to alleviate feature over-smoothing issues such that current backbones can lend themselves to be used in a deep network architecture. However, compared to designing a new GNN, less attention has been paid to underlying topology by graph re-wiring, which mitigates not only flaws of the random walk but also the over-smoothing risk incurred by reducing unnecessary diffusion in deep layers. Inspired by the notion of non-local mean techniques in the area of image processing, we propose a non-local information exchange mechanism by establishing an express connection to the distant node, instead of propagating information along the (possibly very long) original pathway node-after-node. Since the process of seeking express connections throughout a graph can be computationally expensive in real-world applications, we propose a re-wiring framework (coined the express messenger wrapper) to progressively incorporate express links in a non-local manner, which allows us to capture multi-scale features without using a very deep model; our approach is thus free of the over-smoothing challenge. We integrate our express messenger wrapper with existing GNN backbones (either using graph convolution or tokenized transformer) and achieve a new record on the Roman-empire dataset as well as in terms of SOTA performance on both homophilous and heterophilous datasets.","journal":"Electronics","year":2025,"id":533362,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9567,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":921712,"name":"Tingting Dan","orcid":"0000-0001-6936-2649","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1360102,"name":"Jiaqi Ding","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":349857,"name":"Guo‐Rong Wu","orcid":"0000-0003-4918-3955","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1225139,"name":"Ziquan Wei","orcid":"0000-0001-6553-4482","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":34,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:51:32.301795Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}