A Logical View of GNN-Style Computation and the Role of Activation Functions
Summary: Characterizes activation-free MPLang via walk-summed features and shows all eventually constant activations have identical expressive power. Proves ReLU is strictly stronger for numerical queries when combined with linear message passing. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 26 2026)
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Authors
- 1. Pablo Barceló (Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data; National Center for Artificial Intelligence; Pontifical Catholic University of Chile)
- 2. Floris Geerts (University of Antwerp)
- 3. Matthias Lanzinger (Vienna University of Technology)
- 4. Klara Pakhomenko (Hasselt University)
- 5. Jan Van den Bussche (Hasselt University)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{barcelo_pods26,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '26},
title = {{A Logical View of GNN-Style Computation and the Role of Activation Functions}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3801914},
doi = {10.1145/3801914},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Barceló, Pablo and Geerts, Floris and Lanzinger, Matthias and Pakhomenko, Klara and Van den Bussche, Jan},
year = {2026}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 300 | GraphLog: a Visual Formalism for Real Life Recursion | 1990 | PODS | 0.00022046803 |
| 312 | A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion | 1987 | SIGMOD | 0.00021733819 |
| 547 | Cypher: An Evolving Query Language for Property Graphs | 2018 | SIGMOD | 0.00016731552 |
| 747 | Querying Graph Databases | 2013 | PODS | 0.00014400452 |
| 900 | G-CORE: A Core for Future Graph Query Languages | 2018 | SIGMOD | 0.00013337186 |
| 1,575 | Expressive Languages for Path Queries over Graph-Structured Data | 2010 | PODS | 0.00010318258 |
| 6,718 | Minimizing Conjunctive Regular Path Queries | 2025 | PODS | 5.7951134e-05 |
| 7,487 | When is the Evaluation of Extended CRPQ Tractable? | 2022 | PODS | 5.6072799e-05 |
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