Enhancing Logical Expressiveness in Graph Neural Networks via Path-Neighbor Aggregation

Authors

  • Han Yu National University of Defense Technology
  • Xiaojuan Zhao Hunan University of Humanities, Science and Technology
  • Aiping Li National University of Defense Technology
  • Kai Chen National University of Defense Technology
  • Ziniu Liu National University of Defense Technology
  • Zhichao Peng Hunan University of Humanities, Science and Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v40i33.40015

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) can effectively model structural information of graphs, making them widely used in knowledge graph (KG) reasoning. However, existing studies on the expressive power of GNNs mainly focuses on simple single-relation graphs, and there is still insufficient discussion on the power of GNN to express logical rules in KGs. How to enhance the logical expressive power of GNNs is still a key issue. Motivated by this, we propose Path-Neighbor enhanced GNN (PN-GNN), a method to enhance the logical expressive power of GNN by aggregating node-neighbor embeddings on the reasoning path. First, we analyze the logical expressive power of existing GNN-based methods and point out the shortcomings of the expressive power of these methods. Then, we theoretically investigate the logical expressive power of PN-GNN, showing that it not only has strictly stronger expressive power than C-GNN but also that its (k+1)-hop logical expressiveness is strictly superior to that of k-hop. Finally, we evaluate the logical expressive power of PN-GNN on six synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments confirm that PN-GNN enhances the expressive power of logical rules without compromising generalization, as evidenced by its competitive performance in KG reasoning tasks.

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Published

2026-03-14

How to Cite

Yu, H., Zhao, X., Li, A., Chen, K., Liu, Z., & Peng, Z. (2026). Enhancing Logical Expressiveness in Graph Neural Networks via Path-Neighbor Aggregation. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 40(33), 27917–27924. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v40i33.40015

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track on Machine Learning X