arXiv Machine Learning

Evaluating GNNs for Success Prediction in Artist Collaboration Networks

The paper evaluates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for predicting artist success within collaboration networks, extending prior work on Italian and Danish music scenes by adding a Polish dataset and merging the three into a tri‑national network. Statistical analysis shows the Polish and combined networks share similar clustering properties, while predictive experiments reveal that GNNs match or slightly outperform a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) in some cases but the MLP generally yields higher success metrics. The findings suggest that internal node attributes such as genre and label affiliation may be more predictive than network topology, and that GNNs may better capture cross‑border relational structures in the merged network.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

When Design Rules Break: Benchmark Composition Determines Whether Label Informativeness Predicts GNN Aggregator Choice

arXiv:2606. 10249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We examine whether graph neural network (GNN) design rules generalize across benchmark families by studying aggregator selection (sum, mean, max) on 24 node-classification datasets spanning citation, heterophilic, LINKX Facebook-100, co-purchase, and co-authorship graphs.

By Neha Sharma, Ritesh Sharma
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Project Qualia: Recovering Experiential Music Structure from Session Co-occurrence Data

Project Qualia investigates whether experiential similarity between songs can be extracted from listening behavior. Using 1.29 billion scrobbles from 9,396 users, the authors trained a Word2Vec model (Song2Vec) on session data, then applied an artist‑residual procedure to isolate artist‑independent signals. The residual embeddings still contained strong cross‑artist similarity, forming coherent genre and era clusters, demonstrating that experiential structure exists beyond artist identity.

By Nizam Mohammed, Abu B. S. Rahman, Dimuthu D. K. Arachchige
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Recovering Expert Critic-Sourced Network Adjacency between Musical Artists from Acoustic Distributions: A Construct-Validity Approach

The paper investigates whether expert critic‑sourced relationships between musical artists—called critical adjacency—can be recovered from the artists’ acoustic content. By modeling artists as distributions over 80 low‑level acoustic descriptors and measuring pairwise proximity with Wasserstein distances, the authors achieve an out‑of‑sample AUC of 0.767 for predicting critic‑linked edges, with higher recoverability for edges supported by multiple critics. The results suggest that critical discourse contains a reproducible sonic core, while sociological factors also influence the perceived adjacency between artists.

By Elena Badillo-Goicoechea, Fengfeng He
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Not Just Oversmoothing: Detecting the Echo Chamber Effect in Graph Neural Networks

The paper introduces the Echo Chamber Effect, a failure mode in Graph Neural Networks where intra-community representations collapse while inter-community separation remains, differing from traditional oversmoothing. It proposes the Echo Chamber Index (ECI) to detect this effect by stratifying pairwise distances by community membership. Building on this analysis, the authors present Community-Aware Split Propagation (CASP), a lightweight plugin that decouples intra- and inter-community aggregation and learns their balance from label structure, improving performance across various GNN backbones in both homophilic and heterophilic settings.

By Asela Hevapathige, Ahad N. Zehmakan, Asiri Wijesinghe, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

SynCo: Synthetic Community-Aware Attributed Graph Generator for Graph Neural Network Benchmarking

SynCo is a synthetic graph generator that lets users control node degree distributions and sub‑community structures, addressing limitations of existing generators that rely on power‑law distributions and lack flexibility. It is evaluated on graph mimicking, hyperparameter tuning, and node clustering, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods while preserving original data distributions. SynCo can generate large graphs with up to 2.1 million nodes.

By Guilherme Henrique Messias, Mariana Caravanti de Souza, Sylvia Iasulaitis, Alan Dem\'etrius Baria Valejo