Rethinking Message Passing as Retrieval for Text-Attributed Graph Learning

The paper reinterprets graph neural networks (GNNs) as retrieval-augmented models, where each layer uses an MLP on a node representation and a permutation‑invariant summary of retrieved graph context instead of traditional message passing. It introduces RTA, a lightweight MLP‑based framework that replaces structural message passing with label‑aware retrieval and propagation, and provides theoretical links to softmax‑attention message passing and robustness to mis‑retrieved outliers. Experiments on text‑attributed graph benchmarks demonstrate that RTA matches or surpasses strong GNN and graph LLM baselines while improving efficiency and robustness.

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• llms
• rag
• benchmarks