Wasserstein Hypergraph Neural Network

Abstract

The ability to model relational information using machine learning has driven advancements across various domains, from medicine to social science. While graph representation learning has become mainstream over the past decade, representing higher-order relationships through hypergraphs is rapidly gaining momentum. In the last few years, numerous hypergraph neural networks have emerged, most of them falling under a two-stage, set-based framework. The messages are sent from nodes to edges and then from edges to nodes. However, most of the advancement still takes inspiration from the graph counterpart, often simplifying the aggregations to basic pooling operations. In this paper we are introducing Wasserstein Hypergraph Neural Network, a model that treats the nodes and hyperedge neighbourhood as distributions and aggregate the information using Sliced Wasserstein Pooling. Unlike conventional aggregators such as mean or sum, which only capture first-order statistics, our approach has the ability to preserve geometric properties like the shape and spread of distributions. This enables the learned embeddings to reflect how easily one hyperedge distribution can be transformed into another, following principles of optimal transport. Experimental results demonstrate that applying Wasserstein pooling in a hypergraph setting significantly benefits node classification tasks, achieving top performance on several real-world datasets.