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arXiv · 2602.05950

Breaking Symmetry Bottlenecks in GNN Readouts

Mouad Talhi·Arne Wolf·Anthea Monod
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Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used for learning on structured data, yet their ability to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs is fundamentally limited. These limitations are usually attributed to message passing; in this work we show that an independent bottleneck arises at the readout stage. Using finite-dimensional representation theory, we prove that all linear permutation-invariant readouts, including sum and mean pooling, factor through the Reynolds (group-averaging) operator and therefore project node embeddings onto the fixed subspace of the permutation action, erasing all non-trivial symmetry-aware components regardless of encoder expressivity. This yields both a new expressivity barrier and an interpretable characterization of what global pooling preserves or destroys. To overcome this collapse, we introduce projector-based invariant readouts that decompose node representations into symmetry-aware channels and summarize them with nonlinear invariant statistics, preserving permutation invariance while retaining information provably invisible to averaging. Empirically, swapping only the readout enables fixed encoders to separate WL-hard graph pairs and improves performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that readout design is a decisive and under-appreciated factor in GNN expressivity.

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Mouad Talhi, Arne Wolf, Anthea Monod. 2026-02-05. Breaking Symmetry Bottlenecks in GNN Readouts. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05950

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