ScaleGNN: Towards Scalable Graph Neural Networks via Adaptive High-order Neighboring Feature Fusion

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance across diverse graph-based tasks by leveraging message passing to capture complex node relationships. However, on large-scale real-world graphs, GNNs face two major challenges: (1) GNNs struggle to ensure scalability and efficiency as repeated aggregation of large neighborhoods incurs significant computational overhead; (2) GNNs suffer from over-smoothing, where excessive propagation makes node representations indistinguishable, hindering model expressiveness. To tackle these, we propose ScaleGNN, which adaptively fuses multi-hop node features for scalable and effective graph learning. We first compute per-hop pure-neighbor matrices to isolate exclusive structural signals, then apply lightweight fusion to balance low- and high-order information, preserving both local detail and global correlations. To curb redundancy and over-smoothing, we introduce Local Contribution Score (LCS)–based masking to prune low-relevance high-order neighbors, and impose learnable sparsity to selectively integrate valuable multi-hop features. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that ScaleGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNNs in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/lx970414/ScaleGNN.