cs.LGOct 6, 2026

Do Higher-Order Models Win for Higher-Order Reasons? Rethinking Performance Gains in Hypergraph Learning

Authors: Fanchen Bu, Fan Li, Geon Lee, Sunwoo Kim, Xiaoyang Wang, Renaud Lambiotte, Kijung Shin

Organizations: KAIST · UNSW Sydney · University of Oxford

Abstract

Higher-order models (e.g., hypergraph neural networks) often outperform lower-order baselines on hypergraph learning benchmarks, and their advantages are commonly attributed to their ability to exploit higher-order information. However, better performance alone does not establish this explanation. We therefore ask: Do higher-order models win for higher-order reasons? To investigate this question, we introduce a controlled performance-attribution framework that perturbs higher-order information while preserving the lower-order, i.e., pairwise, information. Across 25 commonly used hypergraph learning benchmarks spanning three tasks, we frequently observe an intriguing pattern: higher-order models originally outperform lower-order baselines, yet retain most of their advantage after perturbation. This suggests that much of the observed advantage remains achievable without the higher-order information. We then investigate potential lower-order explanations for these remaining gaps. We find that simple additions to a lower-order baseline, e.g., richer pairwise weighting, more steps of pairwise feature propagation, and normalization, reduce the remaining performance gaps, supporting lower-order explanations for part of the observed advantage. Our analysis calls for the hypergraph learning community to rethink performance attribution by distinguishing performance gains from their explanations, adopt stronger lower-order baselines, and use suitable benchmarks that better test the value of higher-order information.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables66 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Spectral Higher-Order Neural Networks Have Sharp Expressivity Bounds

    Jul 21, 2026Gianluca Peri, Diego Febbe, Duccio FanelliHypergraph Neural NetworksNeural Network Expressivity

  2. Interpretable Hypergraph Learning via Neural Additive Models

    Oct 5, 2026Shihan Feng, Xin Zheng, Shiyi Yang +3Neural Network InterpretabilityHypergraph Neural Networks

  3. Higher-Order Positional Encodings for Graph Representation Learning

    Oct 1, 2026Caleb Stam, Aagrim Hoysal, Sanjukta KrishnagopalGraph Representation LearningPositional Encoding