Bermuda Triangles: GNNs Fail to Detect Simple Topological Structures

Abstract

Most graph neural network architectures work by message-passing node vector embeddings over the adjacency matrix, and it is assumed that they capture graph topology by doing that. We design two synthetic tasks, focusing purely on topological problems -- triangle detection and clique distance -- on which graph neural networks perform surprisingly badly, failing to detect those "bermuda" triangles. Datasets and their generation scripts are publicly available on github.com/FujitsuLaboratories/bermudatriangles and dataset.labs.fujitsu.com.