Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a prominent approach for developing fast, topology-aware surrogates in electric power systems, supporting tasks such as power flow (PF) analysis, optimal power flow (OPF) estimation, and cascading failure analysis (CFA). Despite this growing use, formally verifying GNN-based models remains challenging, with existing methods limited in scope. We extend the neural network verification (NNV) framework to graph-structured inputs through GraphStar sets, a generalization of Star sets that captures uncertainty over both node and edge features. This extension enables the propagation of linear message-passing operations and the sound approximation of ReLU nonlinearities for GNN architectures, including graph convolutional network (GCN) and graph isomorphism network with edge features (GINE) layers. We evaluate GNNV across three power system tasks, PF, OPF, and CFA, on the IEEE-24, IEEE-39, and IEEE-118 test cases, as well as two standard graph classification benchmarks, ENZYMES and PROTEINS. Our results show that GNNV provides tighter robustness guarantees than CORA on graph classification models with ReLU-based activations and, for the first time, delivers edge-aware robustness guarantees for GINE-based PF and OPF models under joint node and edge perturbations.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Transition from a physical power grid to its graph-based representation for GNNs. (top-left) A three-bus system with node features (P,Q,∣V∣,θ) and edge features (g,b) . (top-right) Graph abstraction mapping buses to nodes and transmission lines to edges while preserving features. (bottom-right) Message passing at node v , aggregating information from neighbors u1 and u2 using node and edge features; u and v denote neighboring nodes, df is the node-feature dimension, and de is the edge-feature dimension. (bottom-left) Matrix representation with adjacency matrix A , node-feature matrix X∈RN×df , and edge-feature matrix E∈RM×de .
Figure 2: GNNV reachability pipeline. A GraphStar ΘG=(ΘX,ΘE) encodes bounded perturbations over node and edge features. For node-level tasks, a K -hop subgraph is extracted around the target node v . The input set RL0=[[ΘG]] is propagated through K layers via exact affine transformations and sound ReLU over-approximations (approx-star), and the output set RLK is checked for containment within the specification Φ .
Task
Model
Features
IEEE-24
IEEE-39
IEEE-118
PF
GCN
Node
52.9±1.5
47.4±2.2
46.1±0.1
SAGEConv
Node
22.4±0.1
22.5±0.1
12.9±0.0
GINE
Node+Edge
0.9±0.1
1.1±0.1
1.4±0.1
OPF
GCN
Node
41.9±11.4
35.2±0.2
19.2±0.1
SAGEConv
Node
20.1±0.4
25.4±3.2
13.1±0.6
GINE
Node+Edge
1.0±0.1
1.5±0.2
2.5±0.3
Table 1: Model training performance (test MSE ×10−3 , mean ± std over 5 seeds) for PF and OPF tasks across three IEEE systems. The features column indicates whether the architecture uses only node features or both node and edge features. Bold values indicate the best-performing model per task and system.
Dataset
Classes
Accuracy (%, mean ± std)
Best Seed (%)
ENZYMES
6
62.2±5.4
67.5
PROTEINS
2
71.9±2.4
74.9
IEEE-24 CFA
2
80.7±0.6
81.4
Table 2: Model performance for graph classification tasks used in the CORA comparison (RQ3). All models are three-layer GCNs with ReLU activations and global mean pooling. Best seed selected by highest test accuracy over 5 seeds.
Figure 3: PF verification robustness across IEEE test systems under node perturbations (RQ1). Stacked areas show percentages of verified safe (green), unsafe (red), and inconclusive (orange) outcomes.
Figure 4: OPF verification robustness across IEEE test systems under node perturbations (RQ1). Stacked areas show percentages of verified safe (green), unsafe (red), and inconclusive (orange) outcomes.
Task
System
Time (s/graph) per ϵnode
10−5
10−4
10−3
10−2
PF
IEEE-24
0.22
0.24
0.66
5.11
IEEE-39
0.43
0.63
2.45
18.50
IEEE-118
1.31
1.47
2.78
16.92
OPF
IEEE-24
0.21
0.27
0.89
7.65
IEEE-39
0.42
0.52
2.02
16.46
Table 3: GINE verification timing (s/graph) with subgraph verification (RQ1). Verification conducted on 100 test graphs per system. Times include reachability computation and specification checking.
Robustness (%)
Time (s/graph)
System
ϵnode
Node
+Edge 10−2
Δ
Node
+Edge 10−2
Overhead
IEEE-24
10−5
99.3
99.3
0.0
0.22
0.50
2.3 ×
10−4
99.3
99.3
0.0
0.24
0.55
2.3 ×
10−3
99.2
99.2
0.0
0.66
1.00
1.5 ×
10−2
82.7
82.5
−0.2
5.11
5.82
1.1 ×
IEEE-39
10−5
89.8
89.8
0.0
0.43
0.85
2.0 ×
Table 4: Impact of edge perturbations on GINE verification (RQ2) for the PF task. Robustness shows percentage of verified safe outputs; Δ=(Node+Edge)−(Node-only) . Time overhead is measured in seconds per graph and multiplicative factor.
CORA
GNNV
Dataset
ϵ
Verified
s/g
Verified
s/g
Gain
ENZYMES
0.005
37/81
0.16
45/81
8.00
+8
0.010
3/81
0.18
9/81
24.73
+6
0.020
0/81
0.22
0/81
98.14
0
PROTEINS
0.005
159/167
0.11
159/167
1.45
0
0.010
148/167
0.12
152/167
3.98
+4
Table 5: Comparison of CORA (polyZonotope-based) and GNNV (GraphStar-based) for graph classification robustness verification. Per-graph time (s/g) reported. Gain shows the additional graphs verified by GNNV over CORA. Bold indicates the highest verification count per row.
Figure 5: Comparison of reachable set output bounds produced by CORA (polyZonotope, blue) and GNNV (GraphStar, orange) on an ENZYMES graph. (a) Bounds under perturbation ϵ=0.005 . (b) Bounds under ϵ=0.01 . (c) Zoomed view of (b) for classes C1–C3. The predicted class (C2) is highlighted. GNNV produces tighter bounds that maintain separation of C2 from competing classes, while CORA yields wider enclosures with increased overlap, preventing verification.
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Approx-star
ρ=0.5
ρ=0.8
ρ=0.9
Dataset
ϵ
Ver.
s/g
Ver.
s/g
Ver.
s/g
Ver.
s/g
ENZYMES
0.005
45/81
8.00
44/81
4.19
44/81
1.79
44/81
0.99
0.010
9/81
24.73
8/81
12.96
7/81
5.40
6/81
2.84
0.020
0/81
98.14
0/81
54.06
0/81
22.97
0/81
11.78
PROTEINS
0.005
159/167
1.45
159/167
0.78
159/167
0.35
159/167
0.21
0.010
152/167
3.98
152/167
2.07
151/167
0.90
151/167
0.49
Appendix
Table 6: Relax-star ablation for graph-classification verification (RQ3 benchmarks). Relaxation factor ρ controls the fraction of uncertain ReLU neurons resolved via interval bounds rather than LP. Verified count and per-graph time (s/g) reported.
ϵ
Verified (%)
Unknown (%)
Time (s/graph)
0.01
82.7
17.3
5.11
0.02
54.5
43.9
8.01
0.05
2.2
96.7
24.90
0.10
0.0
100.0
72.66
Appendix
Table 7: Extended perturbation study on IEEE-24 PF (node-only). Verified shows percentage of safe voltage outputs across 100 test graphs. The robustness cliff between ϵ=0.02 and ϵ=0.05 indicates that the model’s voltage predictions become unreliable under perturbations exceeding ∼2% of the normalized input range.
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.
Zichao Yue, Zhiru Zhang
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
Graph neural networks have achieved strong performance on graph-structured data, but their effectiveness depends heavily on the quality of the observed graph. In real applications, graph topology is often imperfect: noisy edges may connect unrelated nodes, while missing edges may prevent useful information from being propagated. Existing robust graph learning methods mainly address this problem by removing suspicious edges or by learning a new graph structure during training. However, edge removal alone cannot recover missing connections, and graph structure learning may introduce additional optimization complexity. In this paper, we propose Topology-Aware Gaussian Repair (TAGR), a simple graph repair framework for robust message passing in graph neural networks. Instead of learning a dense adjacency matrix, TAGR constructs a sparse feature-neighborhood graph using an adaptive Gaussian kernel and combines it with a topology-aware residual correction of the observed graph. The Gaussian repair component introduces auxiliary edges between feature-similar nodes, while the residual correction preserves and reweights the original topology according to local feature and structural consistency. The repaired graph can be used directly with standard graph neural networks without changing their architectures. Extensive experiments on benchmark citation networks show that TAGR improves the robustness of GNNs under both noisy-edge and missing-edge settings. The analysis further show that Gaussian feature-neighborhood repair provides the main robustness gain, while topology-aware residual correction improves stability when the observed graph is incomplete. These results suggest that effective graph robustness can be achieved through lightweight sparse graph repair rather than dense graph structure learning.
Anubha Goel, Juho Kanniainen
Computing Science/Financial Computing and Data Analytics Group, Tampere University, Tampere, 33720, Finland
Power Flow (PF), Optimal Power Flow (OPF), and State Estimation (SE) are fundamental problems in power system analysis, but solving them is computationally expensive. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been proposed as fast surrogates, yet existing solvers are trained for a single problem at a time, producing narrow models that must be rebuilt for each new task. We propose a more general approach: a single Heterogeneous Residual Gated Graph Convolutional Network that solves all three problems with one shared backbone. Rather than learning one mapping, the model learns a reusable representation of how the network behaves, from which PF, OPF, and SE can each be estimated. Trained jointly on the three problems across diverse topologies and loading conditions, and evaluated on the IEEE 14-bus and 118-bus systems, the shared model matches the accuracy of task-specific GNN solvers and stays robust on unseen loading levels and topologies. These results show that a single model can capture the basic operation of a power network and serve several analysis tasks at once, a first step toward a foundation model for power systems.