Do Higher-Order Models Win for Higher-Order Reasons? Rethinking Performance Gains in Hypergraph Learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.07981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Higher-order models (e.g., hypergraph neural networks) often outperform lower-order baselines on hypergraph learning benchmarks, and their advantages are commonly attributed to their ability to exploit higher-order information. However, better performance alone does not establish this explanation. We therefore ask: Do higher-order models win for higher-order reasons? To investigate this question, we introduce a controlled performance-attribution fr