A unifying point of view on expressive power of GNNs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a wide class of connectionist models for graph processing. They perform an iterative message passing operation on each node and its neighbors, to solve classification/ clustering tasks -- on some nodes or on the whole graph -- collecting all such messages, regardless of their order. Despite the differences among the various models belonging to this class, most of them adopt the same computation scheme, based on a local aggregation mechanism and, intuitively, the local computation framework is mainly responsible for the expressive power of GNNs. In this paper, we prove that the Weisfeiler--Lehman test induces an equivalence relationship on the graph nodes that exactly corresponds to the unfolding equivalence, defined on the original GNN model. Therefore, the results on the expressive power of the original GNNs can be extended to general GNNs which, under mild conditions, can be proved capable of approximating, in probability and up to any precision, any function on graphs that respects the unfolding equivalence.