Exploring Oversmoothing with Householder Matrices

Oversmoothing is a fundamental limitation of deep graph neural networks (GNNs), where repeated message passing causes node representations to become increasingly similar, eventually collapsing toward a low-dimensional subspace. This phenomenon limits the effective depth of message-passing architectures and motivates the search for mechanisms that preserve representation diversity. In this paper, we study a recurrent graph neural network in which independent Gaussian noise is injected after every propagation step and analyze the resulting architecture as a stochastic dynamical system. Under a standard global contraction assumption on the deterministic update, we prove that the hidden representations form a geometrically ergodic Markov chain admitting a unique invariant probability measure. Our main theoretical result establishes an explicit positive lower bound on the expected stationary Dirichlet energy, proportional to both the noise variance and the spectral gap of the underlying graph. Consequently, the stationary representations cannot collapse onto the constant manifold, providing a rigorous guarantee that asymptotic oversmoothing is prevented in the sense of non-vanishing Dirichlet energy. Our analysis reveals persistent stochastic perturbations as a fundamentally different mechanism for combating oversmoothing, complementing existing deterministic approaches based on residual connections, normalization, and graph rewiring. Finally, numerical experiments on both linear and nonlinear recurrent graph neural networks closely match the theoretical predictions, illustrating the emergence of a stationary distribution and the predicted dependence of the limiting Dirichlet energy on the noise intensity.

Higher-order couplings enhance the expressive power of hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs), but they also intensify representation collapse in deep propagation due to strong multi-way feature mixing. This work investigates hypergraph oversmoothing from a dynamical-systems perspective and develops a reaction--diffusion framework for depth-resistant hypergraph learning. By defining hypergraph gradient and divergence operators, we interpret message passing as an incidence-level diffusion process. The analysis of pure diffusion shows that its continuous semiflow exponentially contracts the null-mode-free component of node representations and drives the Dirichlet energy to zero, revealing hypergraph oversmoothing as an intrinsic transverse-energy dissipation phenomenon. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Hypergraph Neural Reaction--Diffusion (HNRD), which introduces a reaction mechanism acting on the transverse component to compensate diffusion-induced dissipation and stabilize discriminative variations. We establish global well-posedness of the proposed dynamics and prove that the null-mode-free Dirichlet energy remains bounded away from zero. A forward-Euler discretization provides a practical HNRD layer with a stability condition for deep propagation. Experiments on benchmark and synthetic heterophilic hypergraphs demonstrate that HNRD consistently improves over representative hypergraph baselines. Depth, robustness, and efficiency analyses further show that HNRD preserves stable performance and nonzero Dirichlet energy under deep propagation and perturbations. These results provide a principled dynamical framework for designing deep hypergraph architectures that maintain higher-order expressiveness without representation collapse.

Graphs with heterophily, where adjacent nodes carry different labels, are prevalent in real-world applications, from social networks to molecular interactions. However, existing spectral Graph Neural Network (GNN) approaches tailored for heterophilous graph classification suffer from hub-dominated (node with large degree) aggregation and oversmoothing, as their suboptimal polynomial filters introduce approximation errors and blend distant signals. To address the degree-biased aggregation and suboptimal polynomial filtering, we introduce a Hierarchical Multi-view HAAR (HMH), a novel spectral graph-learning framework that scales in near-linear time . HMH first learns feature- and structure-aware signed affinities via a heterophily-aware encoder, then constructs a soft graph hierarchy guided by these embeddings. At each hierarchical level, HMH constructs a sparse, orthonormal, and locality-aware Haar basis to apply learnable spectral filters in the frequency domain. Finally, skip-connection unpooling layers combine outputs from all hierarchical levels back into the original graph, effectively preventing hub domination and long-range signal bottleneck (over-squashing). Experimentation shows that HMH outperforms state-of-the-art spectral baselines, achieving up to a 3% improvement on node classification and 7% points on graph classification datasets, all while maintaining linear scalability.