How Much Does Message Passing Matter? A Drop-In Study of GNN Layers for Neural Network Graph Regression
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used as regressors, for example to predict the accuracy of a neural architecture. Yet new message-passing (MP) layers are developed and benchmarked almost exclusively on classification tasks, and regression pipelines typically adopt a single MP layer without ablation. We ask how much the choice of MP layer matters for graph-level regression. Holding the architecture, loss and training recipe of four existing GNN regressors fixed, we substitute ten MP configurations spanning convolutional, isomorphism-based and attention-based designs. We evaluate them on eleven datasets of neural-network graphs that range from under ten to over a thousand nodes per ...
| Authors | Keith G. Mills, Aedan J. DeFrates, Joong Ho Kim |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.