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Transductive Generalization via Optimal Transport and Its Application to Graph Node Classification

arXiv cs.LG / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces new representation-based generalization bounds for transductive learning, leveraging optimal transport and Wasserstein distances between encoded feature distributions.
  • These new bounds are computationally efficient and better aligned with empirical generalization in graph node classification compared to classical complexity measures.
  • The study reveals how Graph Neural Network (GNN) aggregation affects representation distributions, showing a trade-off between intra-class concentration and inter-class separation that varies with network depth.
  • This approach explains the observed non-monotonic relationship between GNN depth and generalization error practically seen in graph node classification tasks.
  • The authors provide publicly available code to facilitate reproducibility and practical application of their theoretical developments.

Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.09257 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:Transductive Generalization via Optimal Transport and Its Application to Graph Node Classification

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Abstract:Many existing transductive bounds rely on classical complexity measures that are computationally intractable and often misaligned with empirical behavior. In this work, we establish new representation-based generalization bounds in a distribution-free transductive setting, where learned representations are dependent, and test features are accessible during training. We derive global and class-wise bounds via optimal transport, expressed in terms of Wasserstein distances between encoded feature distributions. We demonstrate that our bounds are efficiently computable and strongly correlate with empirical generalization in graph node classification, improving upon classical complexity measures. Additionally, our analysis reveals how the GNN aggregation process transforms the representation distributions, inducing a trade-off between intra-class concentration and inter-class separation. This yields depth-dependent characterizations that capture the non-monotonic relationship between depth and generalization error observed in practice. The code is available at this https URL.
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09257 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2603.09257v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09257
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: MoonJeong Park [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:43:18 UTC (160 KB)
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