Paper Summary
Paperzilla title
GNNs Getting Squashed? This New Memory Trick Helps Them Remember More!
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often suffer from "over-squashing," where information is lost due to either reduced sensitivity or limited storage capacity. This paper introduces a new synthetic task, Neighbor Associative Recall (NAR), to specifically measure storage capacity over-squashing and presents `gLSTM`, a novel GNN architecture with associative memory that significantly outperforms traditional GNNs on this task and achieves state-of-the-art results on several real-world long-range benchmarks by better retaining information.
Possible Conflicts of Interest
None identified. The listed affiliations are academic/research institutions, and funding sources are primarily research grants, which do not suggest a direct conflict of interest with the research topic.
Identified Weaknesses
The `gLSTM` architecture, while effective, does not retain the efficiency and parallel training capabilities of its xLSTM inspiration, indicating a need for future work on more efficient implementations for MPNNs.
Theoretical Capacity Quantification
Unlike sensitivity over-squashing, the capacity aspect lacks a robust mathematical theory (like the node Jacobian). The paper's insights into capacity are primarily empirical, and a theoretical framework is still needed for more rigorous understanding.
Non-exhaustive Hyperparameter Sweeps
Due to computational constraints, the hyperparameter sweeps for `gLSTM` were not exhaustive, meaning there might be even better configurations not fully explored.
Varied Performance on Benchmarks
While `gLSTM` excels on many long-range tasks, it showed "relatively weak performance" on the LRGB Peptides-Struct benchmark, indicating it's not a universal solution for all graph problems.
Rating Explanation
The paper makes a significant contribution by disambiguating two key aspects of over-squashing in Graph Neural Networks and introducing a valuable new synthetic task to isolate one. The proposed `gLSTM` architecture demonstrates strong empirical performance on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. While the authors acknowledge limitations regarding efficiency and the theoretical understanding of capacity, the work represents a substantial step forward in addressing GNN bottlenecks.
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File Information
Original Title:
GLSTM: MITIGATING OVER-SQUASHING BY INCREASING STORAGE CAPACITY
Uploaded:
October 10, 2025 at 07:15 PM
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