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Bastian Rieck

30 accepted papers

2026

Graph Neural Networks Are Not Continuous Across Graph Resolutions

ICML 2026poster

We show that contrary to conventional wisdom in the community, graph neural networks (GNNs) are not continuous with respect to all natural modes of graph convergence. As a result, GNNs may generate substantially different latent representations for graphs that are very similar. In particular they as…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LEAP: Local ECT-Based Learnable Positional Encodings for Graphs

ICLR 2026poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) largely rely on the message-passing paradigm, where nodes iteratively aggregate information from their neighbors. Yet, standard message passing neural networks (MPNNs) face well-documented theoretical and practical limitations. Graph positional encoding (PE) has emerged…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Diss-l-ECT: Dissecting Graph Data with Local Euler Characteristic Transforms

ICML 2025poster

The Euler Characteristic Transform (ECT) is an efficiently computable geometrical-topological invariant that characterizes the global shape of data. In this paper, we introduce the local Euler Characteristic Transform ($\ell$-ECT), a novel extension of the ECT designed to enhance expressivity and in…

2025

Less is More: Local Intrinsic Dimensions of Contextual Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Understanding the internal mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging and complex endeavor. Even fundamental questions, such as how fine-tuning affects model behavior, often require extensive empirical evaluation. In this paper, we introduce a novel perspective based on the g…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

MAGNet: Motif-Agnostic Generation of Molecules from Scaffolds

ICLR 2025spotlight

Recent advances in machine learning for molecules exhibit great potential for facilitating drug discovery from in silico predictions. Most models for molecule generation rely on the decomposition of molecules into frequently occurring substructures (motifs), from which they generate novel compounds.…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MANTRA: The Manifold Triangulations Assemblage

ICLR 2025poster

The rising interest in leveraging higher-order interactions present in complex systems has led to a surge in more expressive models exploiting higher-order structures in the data, especially in topological deep learning (TDL), which designs neural networks on higher-order domains such as simplicial…

2025

No Metric to Rule Them All: Toward Principled Evaluations of Graph-Learning Datasets

ICML 2025poster

Benchmark datasets have proved pivotal to the success of graph learning, and *good* benchmark datasets are crucial to guide the development of the field. Recent research has highlighted problems with graph-learning datasets and benchmarking practices—revealing, for example, that methods which ignore…

2025

Principal Curvatures Estimation with Applications to Single Cell Data

ICASSP 2025accepted

The rapidly growing field of single-cell transcriptomic sequencing (scRNAseq) presents challenges for data analysis due to its massive datasets. A common method in manifold learning consists in hypothesizing that datasets lie on a lower dimensional manifold. This allows to study the geometry of poin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Metric Space Magnitude for Evaluating the Diversity of Latent Representations

NeurIPS 2024poster

The *magnitude* of a metric space is a novel invariant that provides a measure of the 'effective size' of a space across multiple scales, while also capturing numerous geometrical properties, such as curvature, density, or entropy. We develop a family of magnitude-based measures of the intrinsic div…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Position: Topological Deep Learning is the New Frontier for Relational Learning

ICML 2024poster

Topological deep learning (TDL) is a rapidly evolving field that uses topological features to understand and design deep learning models. This paper posits that TDL is the new frontier for relational learning. TDL may complement graph representation learning and geometric deep learning by incorporat…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2023

Curvature Filtrations for Graph Generative Model Evaluation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graph generative model evaluation necessitates understanding differences between graphs on the distributional level. This entails being able to harness salient attributes of graphs in an efficient manner. Curvature constitutes one such property of graphs, and has recently started to prove useful in…

2023

Ollivier-Ricci Curvature for Hypergraphs: A Unified Framework

ICLR 2023poster

Bridging geometry and topology, curvature is a powerful and expressive invariant. While the utility of curvature has been theoretically and empirically confirmed in the context of manifolds and graphs, its generalization to the emerging domain of hypergraphs has remained largely unexplored. On graph…

2022

Diffusion Curvature for Estimating Local Curvature in High Dimensional Data

NeurIPS 2022accept

We introduce a new intrinsic measure of local curvature on point-cloud data called diffusion curvature. Our measure uses the framework of diffusion maps, including the data diffusion operator, to structure point cloud data and define local curvature based on the laziness of a random walk starting at…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Evaluation Metrics for Graph Generative Models: Problems, Pitfalls, and Practical Solutions

ICLR 2022spotlight

Graph generative models are a highly active branch of machine learning. Given the steady development of new models of ever-increasing complexity, it is necessary to provide a principled way to evaluate and compare them. In this paper, we enumerate the desirable criteria for such a comparison metric…

2022

On Measuring Excess Capacity in Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

We study the excess capacity of deep networks in the context of supervised classification. That is, given a capacity measure of the underlying hypothesis class - in our case, empirical Rademacher complexity - to what extent can we (a priori) constrain this class while retaining an empirical error on…

2022

Topological Graph Neural Networks

ICLR 2022poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a powerful architecture for tackling graph learning tasks, yet have been shown to be oblivious to eminent substructures such as cycles. We present TOGL, a novel layer that incorporates global topological information of a graph using persistent homology. TOGL can be e…

2021

A sandbox for prediction and integration of DNA, RNA, and proteins in single cells

NeurIPS 2021poster

The last decade has witnessed a technological arms race to encode the molecular states of cells into DNA libraries, turning DNA sequencers into scalable single-cell microscopes. Single-cell measurement of chromatin accessibility (DNA), gene expression (RNA), and proteins has revealed rich cellular d…

Cited by 126SourceScholar
2020

Uncovering the Topology of Time-Varying fMRI Data using Cubical Persistence

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a crucial technology for gaining insights into cognitive processes in humans. Data amassed from fMRI measurements result in volumetric data sets that vary over time. However, analysing such data presents a challenge due to the large degree of noise and…

2019

A Persistent Weisfeiler-Lehman Procedure for Graph Classification

ICML 2019oral

The Weisfeiler–Lehman graph kernel exhibits competitive performance in many graph classification tasks. However, its subtree features are not able to capture connected components and cycles, topological features known for characterising graphs. To extract such features, we leverage propagated node l…

2019

Neural Persistence: A Complexity Measure for Deep Neural Networks Using Algebraic Topology

ICLR 2019poster

While many approaches to make neural networks more fathomable have been proposed, they are restricted to interrogating the network with input data. Measures for characterizing and monitoring structural properties, however, have not been developed. In this work, we propose neural persistence, a compl…

2019

Wasserstein Weisfeiler-Lehman Graph Kernels

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Most graph kernels are an instance of the class of R-Convolution kernels, which measure the similarity of objects by comparing their substructures. Despite their empirical success, most graph kernels use a naive aggregation of the final set of substructures, usually a sum or average, thereby potenti…