GDendrite: On Heterophilous Graph Contexts Mining with Versatile Neural Dendrites Framework

A significant challenge for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) lies in accurately performing node classification tasks on heterophilous graphs. Traditional GNN models, which largely rely on the assumption of homophily, often struggle under heterophilous conditions due to the inherent low-pass filtering nature during message-passing among neighboring nodes. Motivated by these limitations, our research explores the dendritic structures found in real neurons, which dynamically amplify and inhibit signals. We demonstrate how the biophysical properties of dendrites enable GNNs to adaptively modulate the Dirichlet energy of graph representations based on the specific context, providing a theoretical justification for integrating neural dendrites into GNNs to improve learning on heterophilous graphs. In this work, we introduce the GDendrite framework, which dynamically adjusts GNN's output response to the various contexts. Our empirical studies, conducted across 13 homophilous and heterophilous benchmark datasets, show that our framework significantly enhances the performance of traditional GNNs in heterophilous settings and outperforms state-of-the-art models in most cases.