MeGA-MP: Metric Graph Advection Message Passing -- A Physics-Informed Message Passing Operator for Advection-Dominated Metric Graphs
Authors: Janine Strotherm, Luca Hermes, André Artelt, Barbara Hammer
Organizations: Bielefeld University
Abstract
Many real-world systems are organized as networks where spatio-temporal dynamics unfold along connections and not discretely between nodes. Examples include utility networks such as water distribution systems or gas networks, electrical grids, and traffic flow networks. Such systems are naturally modeled as metric graphs, where edges correspond to one-dimensional Euclidean subspaces connected at vertices. Metric graphs are independent of an underlying global Euclidean space, limiting direct application of typical PINNs and operator-learning methods. Especially transport dynamics like advection require a methodology able to capture antisymmetric and long-range dependencies on graphs, which is itself a challenge. We propose a novel physics-informed message passing operator that encodes linear advection on metric graphs as an inductive bias. In the purely advective setting, the operator provably recovers the exact dynamics up to a theoretically derived discretization error without any training. Combined with trainable components like MLPs, our message passing operator extends to realistic advection-reaction dynamics in water distribution systems, where we achieve superior performance compared to baselines and zero-shot generalization across different graph topologies.
Edge-attributed multigraphs, in which multiple edges with distinct attributes connect the same pair of nodes, arise naturally in many real-world systems. In these graphs, effective learning requires preserving information from repeated interactions while distinguishing contributions from different neighbors. Existing neural network solutions for edge-attributed multigraphs remain limited: some lose information from repeated interactions, while others break permutation equivariance. To address this, we introduce \emph{neighbor-aware aggregation}, an operator that first combines multi-edge features for each neighbor and then aggregates across neighbors. This operator captures per-neighbor statistics that standard single-stage aggregation cannot represent. Building on this operator, we present MEGA-GNN, a model-agnostic message-passing framework for edge-attributed multigraphs. We show that MEGA-GNN is permutation equivariant and has the same asymptotic complexity as standard GNNs with edge updates. We evaluate our approach on datasets from social networks and financial transaction networks. Neighbor-aware aggregation consistently improves GNN performance and matches or surpasses state-of-the-art methods.
Physics-aware recurrent convolutional networks (PARC) have demonstrated strong performance in predicting nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics by embedding differential operators directly into the computational graph of a neural network. However, pixel-based convolutions are restricted to static, uniform Cartesian grids, making them ill-suited to following evolving localized structures in an efficient manner. Graph neural networks (GNNs) naturally handle irregular spatial discretizations, but existing graph-based physics-aware deep learning (PADL) methods have difficulty handling extreme nonlinear regimes. To address these limitations, we propose Graph PARC (G-PARC), which uses moving least squares (MLS) kernels to approximate spatial derivatives on unstructured graphs, and embeds the derivatives of governing partial differential equations into the network's computational graph. G-PARC achieves better accuracy with 2-3x fewer parameters than MeshGraphNet, MeshGraphKAN, and GraphSAGE, replacing the traditional encoder-processor-decoder framework with analytically computed differential operators. We demonstrate that G-PARC (1) generalizes across nonuniform spatial and temporal discretizations; (2) handles moving meshes required for structural deformation; and (3) outperforms existing graph-based PADL methods on nonlinear benchmarks including fluvial hydrology, planar shock waves, and elastoplastic dynamics. By embedding explicit physical operators within the flexibility of GNNs, G-PARC enables accurate modeling of extreme nonlinear phenomena on complex computational domains, moving PADLbeyond idealized Cartesian grids.
Jack T. Beerman, Tyler J. Abele, Mehdi Taghizadeh +6
Pre-propagation graph neural networks (PPGNNs) decouple node feature propagation from transformation: graph diffusion is performed once as preprocessing, and training reduces to dense per-node transformations. This design enables mini-batch training without inter-node dependencies, avoids repeated sparse matrix--matrix multiplications, and better matches modern accelerators optimized for dense compute. However, their expressivity remains unclear, and empirical results show a gap between PPGNNs and their message-passing counterparts on commonly used graph benchmarks, especially heterophilic ones. In this paper, we propose a suite of robust graph diffusion operators for preprocessing and a few-shot hidden-state re-propagation scheme during training. Our methods improve the validation and test accuracy of PPGNNs, enabling them to match the accuracy of message-passing GNNs while maintaining training efficiency.