Exchangeability of GNN Representations with Applications to Graph Retrieval

Kartik Nair, Indradyumna Roy, Soumen Chakrabarti, Anirban Dasgupta, Abir De

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

In this work, we discover a probabilistic symmetry, called as exchangeability in graph neural networks (GNNs). Specifically, we show that the trained node embedding computed using a large family of graph neural networks, learned under standard optimization tools, are exchangeable random variables. This implies that the probability density of the node embeddings remains invariant with respect to a permutation applied on their dimension axis. This results in identical distribution across the elements of the graph representations. Such a property enables approximation of transportation-based graph similarities by Euclidean similarities between order statistics. Leveraging this reduction, we propose a unified locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) framework that supports diverse relevance measures, including subgraph matching and graph edit distance. Experiments show that our method helps to do LSH more effectively than baselines.