Rethinking Message Passing as Retrieval for Text-Attributed Graph Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26732v1
• Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2026 07:25:44 GMT
• Title: Rethinking Message Passing as Retrieval for Text-Attributed Graph Learning
• Abstract summary: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically conceptualized as message-passing neural networks.<n>We present a retrieval-augmented view of GNNs: each layer makes predictions by applying anvariant to a node representation together with a permutation-in summary of retrieved graph context.<n>Motivated by this perspective, we propose RTA, a simple aggregation-based framework that replaces structural message passing with label-aware retrieval and propagation.
• Score: 63.602658976990874
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically conceptualized as message-passing neural networks, yet it remains unclear why neighborhood aggregation reliably outperforms node-wise multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). Despite its empirical success, this paradigm can be computationally expensive and sensitive to imperfect graph structures. In this work, we present a retrieval-augmented view of GNNs: each layer makes predictions by applying an MLP to a node representation together with a permutation-invariant summary of retrieved graph context. Motivated by this perspective, we propose RTA, a simple MLP-based framework that replaces structural message passing with label-aware retrieval and propagation. We provide theoretical insights that (i) connect retrieval-based aggregation to softmax-attention message passing, and (ii) establish the robustness of retrieved-context supervision to mis-retrieved outliers. Experiments on multiple text-attributed graph benchmarks show that RTA matches or even outperforms strong GNN and graph LLM baselines while improving efficiency and robustness across diverse scenarios.

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