Spectro-Riemannian Graph Neural Networks
Karish Grover, Haiyang Yu, Xiang Song, Qi Zhu, Han Xie, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Christos Faloutsos

TL;DR
This paper introduces Spectro-Riemannian Graph Neural Networks (CUSP), a novel framework that combines spectral filtering and curvature signals on Riemannian manifolds to improve graph representation learning.
Contribution
CUSP is the first model to unify spectral and geometric curvature insights in a mixed-curvature spectral GNN for enhanced node embeddings.
Findings
Outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 5.3% in node classification.
Effective on both homophilic and heterophilic datasets.
Demonstrates the benefit of integrating spectral and curvature signals.
Abstract
Can integrating spectral and curvature signals unlock new potential in graph representation learning? Non-Euclidean geometries, particularly Riemannian manifolds such as hyperbolic (negative curvature) and spherical (positive curvature), offer powerful inductive biases for embedding complex graph structures like scale-free, hierarchical, and cyclic patterns. Meanwhile, spectral filtering excels at processing signal variations across graphs, making it effective in homophilic and heterophilic settings. Leveraging both can significantly enhance the learned representations. To this end, we propose Spectro-Riemannian Graph Neural Networks (CUSP) - the first graph representation learning paradigm that unifies both CUrvature (geometric) and SPectral insights. CUSP is a mixed-curvature spectral GNN that learns spectral filters to optimize node embeddings in products of constant-curvature…
Peer Reviews
Decision·ICLR 2025 Poster
- Originality. I think the proposed CUSP is innovative in the paradign of graph representation learning. CUSP is well-motivated, and indeed improves the performance significantly. - Quality. The paper is well structured. A large number of experiments have been conducted, which are supportive and convincing. - Clarity. The method proposed is deeply explored and proofs are presented as well as a detailed description of the algorithm and the rational for the design consideration that were made. The
As mentioned in the questions, the proposed OCR alternative method should be described in detail, or the proposed method should be used in the experiment.
The paper is well structured and mostly (please see next section) well written. A positive example is the explicit description of the limitations of previous work that are addressed in this paper (i.e. L1-L3 in the introduction). Including the notation table in Appendix 7.1 helps to keep track of the various mathematical concepts. The idea underlying the introduced CUSP Laplacian of including curvature information into the Laplacian-matrix describing the graph is neat. Furthermore the idea
I do have _some_ concerns regarding readability. An easy fix is the image quality in Figure 1. Here the axis labeling of the histograms is not readable if the paper is printed. Could the authors please fix this by including higher resolution images and/or using a larger font size for axis labeling. Regarding the paper itself, aside from some typos and grammatical errors that do not impede the flow of the paper too much, I had trouble understanding Section 4.3; especially from line 327 onward:
The paper introduces a new GNN model that considers spectral information and the curvature.
- The method is incremental. It’s hard to separate the new components in the paper and how they depend on the previous work. Also, there is no theoretical justification for integrating the spectral information in the frequency domain and the curvature in the spatial domain. - More details are needed for the heat diffusion equation and heat flow in Section 4.1. For example, as the cooling depends on the direction (from x to y), what is the role of direction in the heat diffusion equation? What is
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Taxonomy
TopicsNeural Networks and Applications
MethodsSoftmax · Attention Is All You Need
