A.1 Proof of Theorem 1 In this proof, we adopt a simplified version of our message-passing function that ignores the skipconnection: The HGNN trained in the experimental results shown in Figure 2 also does not use skip-connections and hence represents a theoretically-exact KTN component. In the real experiments, we use (1) skip-connections, exploiting their usual benefits (12), and (2) the trainable version of KTN. Without loss of generality, we prove the result for the case where R = {(s,t): s,t T }, meaning the type of an edge is identified with the (ordered) types of the neighbor nodes. In other words, there is only one edge modality possible, such as a social networks with multiple node types (e.g. "friendship" and "message"), the result is extended trivially (through with more algebraically-dense forms of ats and qts). The output of Aggregate is a concatenation of edge-type-specific aggregations (see Equation 3).

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received extensive research attention for their promising performance in graph machine learning. Despite their extraordinary predictive accuracy, existing approaches, such as GCN and GPRGNN, are not robust in the face of homophily changes on test graphs, rendering these models vulnerable to graph structural attacks and with limited capacity in generalizing to graphs of varied homophily levels. Although many methods have been proposed to improve the robustness of GNN models, the majority of these techniques are restricted to the spatial domain and employ complicated defense mechanisms, such as learning new graph structures or calculating edge attention. In this paper, we study the problem of designing simple and robust GNN models in the spectral domain. We propose EvenNet, a spectral GNN corresponding to an even-polynomial graph filter. Based on our theoretical analysis in both spatial and spectral domains, we demonstrate that EvenNet outperforms full-order models in generalizing across homophilic and heterophilic graphs, implying that ignoring odd-hop neighbors improves the robustness of GNNs. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of EvenNet. Notably, EvenNet outperforms existing defense models against structural attacks without introducing additional computational costs and maintains competitiveness in traditional node classification tasks on homophilic and heterophilic graphs.

Homophily is a graph property describing the tendency of edges to connect similar nodes; the opposite is called heterophily. It is often believed that heterophilous graphs are challenging for standard message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs), and much effort has been put into developing efficient methods for this setting. However, there is no universally agreed-upon measure of homophily in the literature. In this work, we show that commonly used homophily measures have critical drawbacks preventing the comparison of homophily levels across different datasets. For this, we formalize desirable properties for a proper homophily measure and verify which measures satisfy which properties.

Graph homophily refers to the phenomenon that connected nodes tend to share similar characteristics. Understanding this concept and its related metrics is crucial for designing effective Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The most widely used homophily metrics, such as edge or node homophily, quantify such similarity as label consistency across the graph topology. These metrics are believed to be able to reflect the performance of GNNs, especially on node-level tasks. However, many recent studies have empirically demonstrated that the performance of GNNs does not always align with homophily metrics, and how homophily influences GNNs still remains unclear and controversial.

In this section, we provide an open-ended discussion on how the prior distribution ( i.e., imbalanced