Message Passing — The Core Mechanism of Every GNN
Strip away the variations and every graph neural network does the same fundamental thing: each node repeatedly gathers information from its neighbors and updates itself. This is message passing, and it's the single idea you need to understand GNNs — GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, and the rest are all just different choices for how a node listens to its neighbors. This post builds message passing from scratch and shows why it elegantly satisfies everything a graph architecture must.
Strip away the variations and every GNN does the same thing: each node repeatedly aggregates information from its neighbors and updates itself. Message passing, why stacking layers widens a node's view to its k-hop neighborhood (convolution generalized to graphs), and the failure modes (over-smoothing, over-squashing) that shape real GNNs.