Scaling Weisfeiler-Leman Expressiveness Analysis to Massive Graphs with GPUs
Filippo Biondi, Mirco Tribastone, Max Tschaikowski
Abstract
The stable coloring of the Weisfeiler-Leman (1-WL) test is a cornerstone of Graph Neural Networks because it provides an upper bound to the expressive power of message-passing architectures. Unfortunately, computing it presents two fundamental bottlenecks. First, classic algorithms are inherently sequential and cannot exploit modern massively parallel hardware. Second, these are \emph{global} algorithms, i.e., they require availability in memory of the full graph, severely limiting applicability to real-world instances. We leverage a linear-algebraic interpretation of 1-WL stable coloring and introduce two key contributions: (i)~a randomized refinement algorithm with tight probabilistic guarantees and (ii)~a correctness-preserving batching scheme that decomposes the graph into independently processable subgraphs while provably returning a stable coloring of the original graph. This approach maps directly to GPU-efficient primitives. In numerical experiments, our CUDA implementation delivers speedups up to two orders of magnitude over classical CPU-based partition refinement and, for the first time, successfully computes stable colorings on web-scale graphs with over 30 billion edges, where CPU baselines time out or fail.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.