A Unified Uncertainty Representation for Graph Neural Networks via Doubly-Spectral Stochastic Expansion
Organizations: Department of Computer Science University of California, Los Angeles · Block, Inc. · Mila, Quebec AI Institute
Abstract
Reliable deployment of graph neural networks requires calibration, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, and robustness to distribution shift, yet existing methods address these needs with separate models and objectives. We model uncertain node embeddings as random graph signals: graph Fourier filters capture structural variation, and a scalar orthogonal-polynomial chaos coordinate captures latent stochastic variation. The resulting doubly-spectral stochastic (DSS) expansion supplies task-matched readouts from one representation: the mean coefficient encodes class evidence for the energy-based OOD score, the higher-order coefficients encode structured logit variation, and quadrature averaging over the chaos coordinate defines the single predictive distribution used for prediction and calibration. A capacity theorem shows that, under a full-rank feature assumption, a restricted subfamily matches the chaos coefficients of any Gaussian-latent random graph signal, with exponentially decaying truncation error under a growth condition; the task-level claims are established empirically. DSS-GNN has two deployment modes: standalone, or as a residual branch beside a deterministic encoder (DSS-Hybrid). Standalone DSS-GNN achieves the lowest Brier score among the compared uncertainty-aware baselines on all 14 node classification benchmarks without post-hoc correction; DSS-Hybrid achieves the best AUROC on most node-OOD settings, competitive cross-graph OOD detection, and the strongest shifted accuracy on all 7 GOOD concept-shift benchmarks under standard empirical risk minimization (ERM). Cross-evaluating both modes on all three tasks shows that each remains effective on the other's tasks, with documented exceptions, and yields explicit deployment guidance.
Figures & tables
| Accuracy (%) | Brier Score | |||||
| Dataset | DSS-GNN | TFE-GNN | G- UQ | DSS-GNN | TFE-GNN | G- UQ |
| Cora | 86.63 1.26 | 71.25 1.90 | 84.35 1.97 | 0.207 0.019 | 0.449 0.024 | 0.226 0.023 |
| Citeseer | 80.20 1.28 | 68.87 1.87 | 70.85 2.22 | 0.308 0.010 | 0.463 0.020 | 0.433 0.026 |
| PubMed | 89.72 0.31 | 82.84 0.76 | 88.18 0.66 | 0.156 0.005 | 0.265 0.011 | 0.179 0.008 |
| Texas | 91.31 3.44 | 84.92 4.26 | 9.02 1.83 | 0.240 0.111 | 0.255 0.083 | 0.779 0.029 |
| Cornell | 85.11 5.12 | 81.28 5.45 | 21.06 3.49 | 0.231 0.079 | 0.290 0.069 | 0.793 0.023 |
| Model | Cora | Amazon-Photo | Coauthor-CS | Cross-graph | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | Feature | Label | Structure | Feature | Label | Structure | Feature | Label | Twitch | Arxiv | |
| GNNSafe | 87.52 | 93.44 | 92.80 | 99.58 | 98.55 | 97.35 | 99.60 | 99.64 | 97.23 | 66.82 | 71.06 |
| GNNSafe++ | 90.62 | 95.56 | 92.75 | 99.82 | 99.64 | 97.51 | 99.99 | 99.97 | 97.89 | 95.36 | 74.77 |
| Graph-EBM | 61.14 | 72.42 | 92.69 | 75.22 | 86.49 | 97.24 | 72.75 | 89.28 | 97.91 | 44.43 | 52.80 |
| MC-dropout | 87.50 | 93.12 | 93.03 | 98.67 | 98.50 | 96.80 | 99.51 | 99.53 | 97.25 | 68.58 | 66.34 |
| Deep Ensemble | 87.87 | 93.63 | 93.75 | 98.58 | 98.43 | 97.35 | 98.18 | 98.45 | 94.97 | 72.25 | 67.72 |
| Twitch | Arxiv | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | AUROC | AUPR | FPR95 | ID Acc. | AUROC | AUPR | FPR95 | ID Acc. |
| GNNSafe | 66.82 | 70.97 | 76.24 | 70.40 | 71.06 | 80.44 | 87.01 | 53.39 |
| GNNSafe++ | 95.36 | 97.12 | 33.57 | 70.18 | 74.77 | 83.21 | 77.43 | 53.50 |
| Graph-EBM | 44.43 | 57.91 | 94.84 | 63.04 | 52.80 | 65.88 | 97.40 | 53.45 |
| MC-dropout | 68.58 | 81.25 | 94.84 | 64.10 | 66.34 | 74.88 | 89.69 | 53.56 |
| Deep Ensemble | 72.25 | 83.19 | 94.29 | 66.94 | 67.72 | 75.98 | 87.32 | 47.58 |
| Model | GOOD-CBAS | GOOD-WebKB | GOOD-Twitch | GOOD-Cora | GOOD-Cora | GOOD-Arxiv | GOOD-Arxiv |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| color | university | language | word | degree | time | degree | |
| ERM | 82.43 | 27.16 | 51.59 | 64.03 | 60.30 | 65.64 | 54.81 |
| IRM | 82.00 | 26.06 | 49.78 | 63.93 | 60.26 | 65.54 | 56.72 |
| VREx | 82.86 | 26.61 | 55.75 | 64.03 | 60.53 | 65.92 | 56.68 |
| Coral | 81.57 | 28.07 | 51.80 | 64.04 | 60.30 | 65.79 | 55.14 |
| DANN | 83.57 | 29.36 | 51.67 | 63.96 | 60.23 | 65.67 | 55.34 |
| Task | Standalone DSS-GNN | DSS-Hybrid |
|---|---|---|
| Calibration (14 datasets) | Best Brier on all 14 and best accuracy on 13 (Table 1 ); stronger than the hybrid on 13 of 14 | Never loses beyond noise to its own GCN base; Roman-Empire accuracy, Brier |
| OOD detection (11 settings) | Effective on 10 of 11: Cora , Photo – , CS – , Arxiv (margin objective); the Twitch energy score does not separate | Best published AUROC on 7 of 11 (Table 2 ); stronger than the standalone on 10 of 11 |
| GOOD concept shift (7 settings) | Above every published baseline on 5 of 7, at ERM level on the other 2 | Strongest on all 7 (Table 4 ) |
Appendix figures & tables25 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Method | Calibration | OOD Detection | Robust Classif. |
|---|---|---|---|
| MC-dropout [ 10 ] | (✓) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Deep Ensembles [ 17 ] | ✓ | (✓) | ✗ |
| G- UQ [ 33 ] | ✓ | ✓ ∗ | ✓ |
| TFE-GNN [ 8 ] | (✓) | ✗ | ✗ |
| GNNSafe [ 36 ] | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| GNNSafe++ [ 36 ] | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Dataset(s) | Repository | License |
|---|---|---|
| Cora, Citeseer, PubMed | https://github.com/kimiyoung/planetoid | MIT |
| Texas, Cornell, Wisconsin, | https://github.com/bingzhewei/geom-gcn | not stated |
| Chameleon, Squirrel | ||
| Coauthor-CS, Amazon-Photo | https://github.com/shchur/gnn-benchmark | MIT |
| Roman-Empire, Amazon-Ratings, | https://github.com/yandex-research/heterophilous-graphs | MIT |
| Minesweeper, Tolokers, Questions |
| Dataset | Nodes | Edges | Classes | Features |
| Cora | 2,708 | 10,556 | 7 | 1,433 |
| Citeseer | 3,327 | 9,228 | 6 | 3,703 |
| PubMed | 19,717 | 88,651 | 3 | 500 |
| Texas | 183 | 574 | 5 | 1,703 |
| Cornell | 183 | 557 | 5 | 1,703 |
| Wisconsin | 251 | 916 | 5 | 1,703 |
| Dataset | OOD type | Nodes | Edges | Classes | Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | structure / feature / label | 2,708 | 10,556 | 7 | 1,433 |
| Amazon-Photo | structure / feature / label | 7,650 | 238,162 | 8 | 745 |
| Coauthor-CS | structure / feature / label | 18,333 | 163,788 | 15 | 6,805 |
| Twitch (DE ES/FR/RU) | cross-graph | 9,498 | 306,276 | 2 | 3,170 |
| Arxiv ( 2015 2018–20) | cross-graph (temporal) | 169,343 | 2,315,598 | 40 | 128 |
| Setting | Domain | Nodes | Edges | Classes | Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GOOD-Cora / degree | node degree | 19,793 | 126,842 | 70 | 8,710 |
| GOOD-Cora / word | word diversity | 19,793 | 126,842 | 70 | 8,710 |
| GOOD-Arxiv / degree | node degree | 169,343 | 2,315,598 | 40 | 128 |
| GOOD-Arxiv / time | publication year | 169,343 | 2,315,598 | 40 | 128 |
| GOOD-CBAS / color | node color | 700 | 3,962 | 4 | 4 |
| GOOD-WebKB / university | university | 617 | 1,138 | 5 | 1,703 |
| Dataset | Architecture | Hidden | Optimizer | Overrides | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | Prop-first (rw) | 64 | 2 | Adam | dropout 0.8 |
| Citeseer | Cheb | 64 | 2 | Adam | none |
| PubMed | Cheb | 128 | 2 | Adam | none |
| Texas | Prop-first | 64 | 2 | RMSprop | none |
| Cornell | Cheb | 128 | 2 | Adam | dropout 0.8 |
| Wisconsin | Cheb | 64 | 2 | Adam | dropout 0.6 |
| Dataset | Accuracy | Brier | Val. Brier | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 1 | 0.01 | 4 | 86.63 1.26 | 0.207 0.019 | 0.203 |
| Citeseer | 2 | 0 | 4 | 80.20 1.28 | 0.308 0.010 | 0.315 |
| PubMed | 5 | 0.01 | 4 | 89.72 0.31 | 0.156 0.005 | 0.152 |
| Texas | 2 | 0.01 | 4 | 91.31 3.44 | 0.240 0.111 | 0.190 |
| Cornell | 1 | 0.01 | 4 | 85.11 5.12 | 0.231 0.079 | 0.166 |
| Wisconsin | 2 | 0 | 4 | 93.25 3.39 | 0.104 0.047 | 0.088 |
| Dataset | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 85.12 1.06 | 86.63 1.26 | 86.33 1.12 | 86.33 0.82 | 86.63 1.14 | 86.32 1.13 | 86.61 0.84 | 86.38 0.96 |
| Citeseer | 65.39 1.02 | 79.21 0.79 | 80.20 1.28 | 78.47 0.80 | 71.50 4.58 | 78.92 1.13 | 76.77 2.19 | 78.49 1.08 |
| PubMed | 89.12 0.57 | 89.33 0.49 | 89.33 0.66 | 89.38 0.67 | 89.33 0.54 | 89.72 0.31 | 89.40 0.57 | 89.39 0.51 |
| Texas | 75.08 23.70 | 88.36 4.57 | 91.31 3.44 | 89.18 4.92 | 91.31 3.30 | 87.54 5.59 | 89.01 2.82 | 87.37 5.43 |
| Cornell | 83.62 6.80 | 85.11 5.12 | 85.74 6.73 | 83.62 5.39 | 84.26 6.87 | 83.83 7.38 | 83.62 6.53 | 82.98 7.61 |
| Wisconsin | 93.25 3.46 | 92.87 2.92 | 93.25 3.39 | 88.50 3.35 | 93.00 3.46 | 90.75 2.84 | 89.63 4.82 | 90.50 2.92 |
| Dataset | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 0.228 0.013 | 0.207 0.019 | 0.212 0.016 | 0.209 0.016 | 0.208 0.019 | 0.215 0.015 | 0.211 0.011 | 0.211 0.015 |
| Citeseer | 0.427 0.008 | 0.346 0.008 | 0.308 0.010 | 0.326 0.012 | 0.422 0.027 | 0.327 0.012 | 0.370 0.023 | 0.331 0.013 |
| PubMed | 0.162 0.007 | 0.158 0.007 | 0.160 0.008 | 0.159 0.008 | 0.161 0.007 | 0.156 0.005 | 0.159 0.008 | 0.159 0.007 |
| Texas | 0.269 0.082 | 0.213 0.111 | 0.240 0.111 | 0.233 0.096 | 0.253 0.096 | 0.253 0.086 | 0.249 0.114 | 0.242 0.082 |
| Cornell | 0.241 0.087 | 0.231 0.079 | 0.228 0.088 | 0.250 0.090 | 0.263 0.129 | 0.247 0.107 | 0.252 0.079 | 0.273 0.111 |
| Wisconsin | 0.103 0.048 | 0.107 0.041 | 0.104 0.047 | 0.161 0.060 | 0.103 0.048 | 0.129 0.037 | 0.153 0.052 | 0.135 0.040 |
| Setting | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| GOOD-Cora / word | 63.24 0.40 | 64.89 0.21 | 64.01 0.25 |
| GOOD-Cora / degree | 61.38 0.81 | 62.60 0.59 | 61.22 0.07 |
| GOOD-Arxiv / time | 64.81 0.27 | 65.43 1.07 | 64.48 0.27 |
| Dataset | Structure | Feature | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | |||
| Amazon-Photo | |||
| Coauthor-CS | |||
| Twitch (cross-graph) | |||
| Arxiv (cross-graph) | |||
| Dataset | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 0.219 | 0.219 | 0.207 | 0.220 |
| Citeseer | 0.308 | 0.310 | 0.318 | 0.499 |
| PubMed | 0.159 | 0.156 | 0.156 | 0.157 |
| Texas | 0.366 | 0.246 | 0.213 | 0.251 |
| Cornell | 0.230 | 0.237 | 0.228 | 0.342 |
| Wisconsin | 0.103 | 0.107 | 0.108 | 0.174 |
| Dataset | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 0.216 | 0.207 | 0.217 | 0.209 | 0.212 |
| Citeseer | 0.310 | 0.308 | 0.312 | 0.313 | 0.311 |
| PubMed | 0.157 | 0.156 | 0.156 | 0.158 | 0.156 |
| Texas | 0.216 | 0.221 | 0.213 | 0.217 | 0.218 |
| Cornell | 0.235 | 0.286 | 0.228 | 0.218 | 0.242 |
| Wisconsin | 0.142 | 0.109 | 0.115 | 0.103 | 0.108 |
| Dataset | ChebNet | Best | Chaos | |
| Cora | 0.281 | 0.228 | 0.207 | |
| Citeseer | 0.470 | 0.427 | 0.308 | |
| PubMed | 0.171 | 0.162 | 0.156 | |
| Texas | 0.208 | 0.269 | 0.213 | |
| Cornell | 0.324 | 0.241 | 0.228 | |
| Wisconsin | 0.073 | 0.103 | 0.103 |
| Dataset | Ratio / | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora (2.7K nodes) | 35 | 67 | 102 | 131 | |
| Amazon-Rat. (25K nodes) | 464 | 526 | 576 | 646 | |
| ogbn-arxiv (169K nodes) | 2002 | 2088 | 2174 | 2273 | |
| ogbn-arxiv peak memory (MiB) | 1721 | 2813 | 3976 | 5141 |
| Component | Comparison | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Chaos expansion ( ) | vs best , same architecture (Tables 13 , 14 , 19 ) | Calibration: Citeseer Brier and accuracy points (the endpoint also beats plain GCN, vs Brier, Tables 1 / 23 ); Texas ; Minesweeper |
| Chaos expansion ( ) | OOD ablation varying only (Appendix E.2 ) | Energy AUROC flat across (Cora-structure at one fixed configuration); detection reads the mean logit, so can be selected for calibration without changing detection |
| Chaos expansion ( ) | GOOD ablation at the selected configurations (Table 15 ) | Shifted accuracy: beats on GOOD-Cora word ( ), degree ( ), and GOOD-Arxiv time ( ) |
| Spectral backbone (chaos off) | vs GCN (Tables 13 , 23 ) | Heterophilous accuracy comes from the spectral backbone: Roman-Empire at vs GCN |
| Filtering design vs single filter | Per-dataset architecture at vs single-branch ChebNet (Table 19 ) | Lower or equal Brier for the full design on 12 of 14 datasets (equal on Questions; Chameleon vs , Squirrel vs , Roman-Empire vs ); exceptions are Texas and Wisconsin |
| DSS residual branch (as a unit) | Hybrid vs identically trained GCN base, 14 datasets (Table 24 ) | Accuracy: Roman-Empire , Minesweeper ; no dataset loses beyond noise (worst ) |
| Dataset | DSS-GNN | MC-dropout | Deep Ensemble | Plain GCN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 0.207 (86.63) | 0.2188 (87.36) | 0.2134 (87.45) | 0.2125 (87.47) |
| Citeseer | 0.308 (80.20) | 0.3230 (80.03) | 0.3170 (79.77) | 0.3176 (80.00) |
| PubMed | 0.156 (89.72) | 0.2176 (86.20) | 0.2153 (86.16) | 0.2155 (86.10) |
| Texas | 0.240 (91.31) | 0.5862 (64.43) | 0.5686 (62.79) | 0.5758 (64.43) |
| Cornell | 0.231 (85.11) | 0.6829 (52.77) | 0.6826 (52.98) | 0.6839 (52.34) |
| Wisconsin | 0.104 (93.25) | 0.6370 (50.38) | 0.6373 (51.25) | 0.6435 (50.25) |
| Accuracy (%) | Brier Score | |||||
| Dataset | DSS-GNN | GCN | GAT | DSS-GNN | GCN | GAT |
| Cora | 86.63 1.26 | 87.45 1.61 | 87.75 1.71 | 0.207 0.019 | 0.213 0.014 | 0.222 0.015 |
| Citeseer | 80.20 1.28 | 79.84 0.96 | 80.57 1.12 | 0.308 0.010 | 0.318 0.007 | 0.353 0.007 |
| PubMed | 89.72 0.31 | 86.21 0.31 | 85.72 0.28 | 0.156 0.005 | 0.215 0.005 | 0.232 0.004 |
| Texas | 91.31 3.44 | 64.43 6.80 | 71.80 7.06 | 0.240 0.111 | 0.576 0.031 | 0.555 0.038 |
| Cornell | 85.11 5.12 | 52.34 9.99 | 49.57 12.63 | 0.231 0.079 | 0.684 0.080 | 0.631 0.073 |
| Standalone DSS-GNN | DSS-Hybrid | GCN base | ||||
| Dataset | Accuracy | Brier | Accuracy | Brier | Accuracy | Brier |
| Cora | 86.63 1.26 | 0.207 0.019 | 84.33 0.97 | 0.241 0.015 | 84.20 1.02 | 0.243 0.016 |
| Citeseer | 80.20 1.28 | 0.308 0.010 | 74.71 1.05 | 0.375 0.009 | 74.32 1.13 | 0.378 0.009 |
| PubMed | 89.72 0.31 | 0.156 0.005 | 88.27 0.56 | 0.177 0.006 | 87.93 0.56 | 0.181 0.006 |
| Texas | 91.31 3.44 | 0.240 0.111 | 45.57 7.68 | 0.737 0.034 | 46.39 7.55 | 0.737 0.034 |
| Cornell | 85.11 5.12 | 0.231 0.079 | 55.11 14.03 | 0.656 0.142 | 47.66 12.01 | 0.727 0.068 |
| Setting | Standalone AUROC | Standalone ID acc. | Hybrid AUROC | Hybrid ID acc. | Objective (standalone) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora / structure | 79.79 1.46 ( BN) | 69.50 | 94.32 | n/r ∗ | standard (no OOD exposure) |
| Cora / feature | 88.15 1.02 ( BN) | 69.17 | 97.60 | n/r ∗ | standard (no OOD exposure) |
| Cora / label | 94.03 1.09 ( BN) | 89.24 | 94.11 | n/r ∗ | standard (no OOD exposure) |
| Amazon-Photo / structure | 96.53 1.41 ( BN) | 91.59 | 99.69 | n/r ∗ | standard (no OOD exposure) |
| Amazon-Photo / feature | 98.10 0.11 ( BN) | 92.00 | 99.66 | n/r ∗ | standard (no OOD exposure) |
| Amazon-Photo / label | 96.53 0.10 ( BN) | 94.81 | 97.52 | n/r ∗ | standard (no OOD exposure) |
| Setting | Standalone | Hybrid | Best baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| GOOD-CBAS / color | 82.38 13.17 ( BN) | 88.57 | TAR 87.29 |
| GOOD-WebKB / university | 36.41 1.60 ( BN) | 40.77 | TAR 30.83 |
| GOOD-Twitch / language | 60.28 0.51 ( BN) | 61.21 | TAR 57.20 |
| GOOD-Cora / word | 64.89 0.21 ( BN) | 64.81 | TAR 64.73 |
| GOOD-Cora / degree | 62.60 0.59 ( BN) | 62.73 | TAR 61.73 |
| GOOD-Arxiv / time | 65.43 1.07 ( BN) | 66.76 | TAR 66.08 |
| Dataset | Brier | Disagree (%) | Dataset | Brier | Disagree (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 0.0002 | 0.03 | Roman-Emp. | 0.0000 | 0.00 |
| Citeseer | 0.0000 | 0.00 | Amz-Rat. | 0.0000 | 0.00 |
| PubMed | 0.0000 | 0.02 | Minesweeper | 0.0003 | 0.21 |
| Texas | 0.0021 | 0.00 | Tolokers | 0.0000 | 0.00 |
| Cornell | 0.0000 | 0.00 | Questions | 0.0000 | 0.00 |
| Wisconsin | 0.0000 | 0.00 | CS | 0.0001 | 0.00 |
| Dataset | BatchNorm off (control) | Table 1 | BatchNorm on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cora | 86.44 1.56 / 0.216 0.022 | 86.63 1.26 / 0.207 0.019 | 85.78 1.76 / 0.220 0.017 |
| Citeseer | 80.27 1.18 / 0.307 0.010 | 80.20 1.28 / 0.308 0.010 | 67.03 1.85 / 0.480 0.024 |
| Wisconsin | 93.62 1.72 / 0.109 0.029 | 93.25 3.39 / 0.104 0.047 | 91.75 4.75 / 0.134 0.061 |
| Roman-Empire | 78.82 1.08 / 0.300 0.012 | 78.84 0.61 / 0.300 0.007 | 78.60 0.64 / 0.300 0.009 |
| Setting (covariate split) | ERM GCN | DSS-Hybrid (ERM) |
|---|---|---|
| GOOD-CBAS / color | 49.05 | 53.33 |
| GOOD-WebKB / university | 13.49 | 29.10 |
| GOOD-Twitch / language | 42.78 | 52.64 |
| GOOD-Cora / word | 61.84 | 64.18 |
| GOOD-Cora / degree | 56.66 | 54.94 |
| GOOD-Arxiv / time | 44.80 ∗ | 70.39 |
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| the single shared standard Gaussian latent; never sampled, integrated out by quadrature | |
| normalized Hermite polynomial of order ; orthonormal basis of | |
| chaos truncation order; index input/output chaos orders | |
| order- chaos coefficient of the layer- embeddings ( 2 ); the embedding field is | |
| , | rescaled Laplacian and Chebyshev polynomial of degree (Section 2 ) |
| learned low/high-pass filter polynomials of degrees with coefficients ( 3 ) |