Hierarchical Multi Scale Graph Neural Networks: Scalable Heterophilous Learning with Oversmoothing and Oversquashing Mitigation
Abstract
Graphs with heterophily, where adjacent nodes carry different labels, are prevalent in real-world applications, from social networks to molecular interactions. However, existing spectral Graph Neural Network (GNN) approaches tailored for heterophilous graph classification suffer from hub-dominated (node with large degree) aggregation and oversmoothing, as their suboptimal polynomial filters introduce approximation errors and blend distant signals. To address the degree-biased aggregation and suboptimal polynomial filtering, we introduce a Hierarchical Multi‐view HAAR (HMH), a novel spectral graph‐learning framework that scales in near‑linear time . HMH first learns feature- and structure-aware \emph{signed} affinities via a heterophily-aware encoder, then constructs a soft graph hierarchy guided by these embeddings. At each hierarchical level, HMH constructs a sparse, orthonormal, and locality-aware Haar basis to apply learnable spectral filters in the frequency domain. Finally, skip-connection unpooling layers combine outputs from all hierarchical levels back into the original graph, effectively preventing hub domination and long-range signal bottleneck (over-squashing). Experimentation shows that HMH outperforms state‑of‑the‑art spectral baselines, achieving up to a 3 % improvement on node classification and 7% on graph classification datasets, all while maintaining linear scalability.