On the Completeness of Invariant Geometric Deep Learning Models

Invariant models, one important class of geometric deep learning models, are capable of generating meaningful geometric representations by leveraging informative geometric features. These models are characterized by their simplicity, good experimental results and computational efficiency. However, their theoretical expressive power still remains unclear, restricting a deeper understanding of the potential of such models. In this work, we concentrate on characterizing the theoretical expressiveness of invariant models. We first rigorously bound the expressiveness of the most classical invariant model, Vanilla DisGNN (message passing neural networks incorporating distance), restricting its unidentifiable cases to be only those highly symmetric geometric graphs. To break these corner cases' symmetry, we introduce a simple yet E(3)-complete invariant design by nesting Vanilla DisGNN, named GeoNGNN. Leveraging GeoNGNN as a theoretical tool, we for the first time prove the E(3)-completeness of three well-established geometric models: DimeNet, GemNet and SphereNet. Our results fill the gap in the theoretical power of invariant models, contributing to a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of their capabilities. Experimentally, GeoNGNN exhibits good inductive bias in capturing local environments, and achieves competitive results w.r.t. complicated models relying on high-order invariant/equivariant representations while exhibiting significantly faster computational speed.