Differentiable Lifting for Topological Neural Networks

Jorge Franco, Gabriel Duarte, Alexander Nikitin, Moacir Ponti, Diego Mesquita, Amauri Souza

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Topological neural networks (TNNs) enable leveraging higher-order structures on graphs (e.g., cycles and cliques) to boost the expressive power of message-passing neural networks. In turn, however, these structures are typically identified a priori through an unsupervised graph lifting operation. Notwithstanding, this choice is crucial and may have a drastic impact on a TNN's performance on downstream tasks. To circumvent this issue, we propose ∂lift (DiffLift), a general framework for learning graph liftings to hypergraphs and cellular, simplicial, and combinatorial complexes in an end-to-end fashion. In particular, our approach leverages learned vertex-level latent representations to identify and parameterize distributions over candidate higher-order cells for inclusion. This results in a scalable model which can be readily integrated into any TNN. Our experiments show that ∂lift outperforms existing lifting methods on multiple benchmarks for graph and node classification across different TNN architectures, with TNN+ ∂lift combinations surpassing standard GNN baselines. Notably, our approach leads to gains of up to 45% over static liftings, including both connectivity- and feature-based ones.