On the power of graph neural networks and the role of the activation function

In this article we present new results about the expressivity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). We prove that for any GNN with piecewise polynomial activations, whose architecture size does not grow with the graph input sizes, there exists a pair of non-isomorphic rooted trees of depth two such that the GNN cannot distinguish their root vertex up to an arbitrary number of iterations. The proof relies on tools from the algebra of symmetric polynomials. In contrast, it was already known that unbounded GNNs (those whose size is allowed to change with the graph sizes) with piecewise polynomial activations can distinguish these vertices in only two iterations. It was also known prior to our work that with ReLU (piecewise linear) activations, bounded GNNs are weaker than unbounded GNNs [Aamand & Al., 2022]. Our approach adds to this result by extending it to handle any piecewise polynomial activation function, which goes towards answering an open question formulated by Grohe [Grohe,2021] more completely. Our second result states that if one allows activations that are not piecewise polynomial, then in two iterations a single neuron perceptron can distinguish the root vertices of any pair of nonisomorphic trees of depth two (our results hold for activations like the sigmoid, hyperbolic tan and others). This shows how the power of graph neural networks can change drastically if one changes the activation function of the neural networks. The proof of this result utilizes the Lindemann-Weierstrauss theorem from transcendental number theory.