Hierarchical Uncertainty-Aware Graph Neural Network

Recent research on graph neural networks (GNNs) has explored mechanisms for capturing local uncertainty and exploiting graph hierarchies to mitigate data sparsity and leverage structural properties. However, the synergistic integration of these two approaches remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel architecture, the Hierarchical Uncertainty-Aware Graph Neural Network (HU-GNN), which unifies multi-scale representation learning, principled uncertainty estimation, and self-supervised embedding diversity within a single end-to-end framework. Specifically, HU-GNN adaptively forms node clusters and estimates uncertainty at multiple structural scales from individual nodes to higher levels. These uncertainty estimates guide a robust message-passing mechanism and attention weighting, effectively mitigating noise and adversarial perturbations while preserving predictive accuracy on both node- and graph-level tasks. We also offer key theoretical contributions, including a probabilistic formulation, rigorous uncertainty-calibration guarantees, and formal robustness bounds. Finally, by incorporating recent advances in graph contrastive learning, HU-GNN maintains diverse, structurally faithful embeddings. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art robustness and interpretability.

@article{choi2025_2504.19820,
  title={ Hierarchical Uncertainty-Aware Graph Neural Network },
  author={ Yoonhyuk Choi and Chong-Kwon Kim },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.19820},
  year={ 2025 }
}