Aggregating Direct and Indirect Neighbors through Graph Linear Transformations

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNN) typically rely on localized message passing, requiring increasing depth to capture long range dependencies. In this work, we introduce Graph Linear Transformations, a linear transformation that realizes direct and indirect feature mixing on graphs through a single, well-defined linear operator derived from the graph structure. By interpreting graphs as walk-summable Gaussian graphical models, we compute these transformations via Gaussian Belief Propagation, enabling each node to aggregate information from both direct and indirect neighbors without explicit enumeration of multi-hop paths. We show that different constructions of the underlying precision matrix induce distinct and interpretable propagation biases, ranging from selective edge-level interactions to uniform structural smoothing, and that Graph Linear Transformations can achieve competitive or superior performance compared to both local message-passing GNNs and dynamic neighborhood aggregation models across homophilic and heterophilic benchmark datasets.