cs.LGMay 22, 2026

Weisfeiler-Leman Is Incomplete on Simple Spectrum Graphs, so Canonicalize Them

Authors: Snir HordanNadav DymTim Seppelt

Organizations: Faculty of Mathematics Technion - Israel Institute of Technology · IT University of Copenhagen

Abstract

Graphs with a simple spectrum admit cubic-time isomorphism testing, yet we prove that for every natural number kk, the kk-Weisfeiler-Leman (kk-WL) test cannot distinguish all non-isomorphic graphs with a simple spectrum. As the WL hierarchy upper-bounds the distinguishing power of widely-used Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), this incompleteness applies to all such GNNs, ruling out completeness for every kk-WL-aligned GNN family. To close this gap, we introduce PRiSM (Partition, Refine, Solve, Match), the first provably complete canonicalization of simple-spectrum eigendecompositions. PRiSM obtains the completeness guarantee that prior canonicalizations provably lack, and resolves the open problem of achieving complete expressivity on simple-spectrum graphs. When composed with DeepSets or a Transformer, PRiSM achieves universal approximation on simple-spectrum graphs, justifying the use of canonicalized Laplacian positional encodings. Empirically, PRiSM performs comparably to or outperforms existing spectral canonicalizations on graph regression, classification, and expressivity

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