Gauge-Invariant Learnable Spectral Positional Encodings for Directed Graphs via Hermitian Block Krylov Subspaces

Spectral positional encodings (PEs) for \emph{directed} graphs face two obstacles: magnetic Laplacians require an $O(n^3)$ Hermitian eigendecomposition per potential, and their complex eigenvectors are defined only up to unitary gauge, which prior work handles with basis-invariant architectures.

We propose learnable spectral PEs of the form $h_\theta(A_q)\,R$, where $A_q$ is a normalized magnetic operator, $h_\theta$ a learnable scalar spectral response, and $R$ a block of random probes.

Because the PE is a \emph{matrix function} of the operator, it is gauge-invariant by construction.

We compute it in a Hermitian block Krylov subspace from sparse matrix--vector products only, prove that $k = O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ block steps suffice uniformly over heat--resolvent response families, and give a covering-number argument for why low-dimensional structured families generalize where free per-eigenvalue weights overfit.

On a directed SBM whose symmetrization is uninformative by construction, direction-blind PEs stay at chance while magnetic Krylov PEs converge to the exact-eigendecomposition oracle as the depth grows.

The same probes yield gauge-invariant pairwise features with $1/\sqrt{s}$ Monte-Carlo error, and the undirected $q{=}0$ case improves heterophilous benchmarks over no-PE and polynomial baselines.