A General Framework for Learning Algebraic Properties from Cayley Graphs using Graph Neural Networks
About
In this work, we present a general Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework for learning algebraic properties of finite groups from their Cayley graph representations. The framework provides a unified computational pipeline consisting of a common graph construction procedure, feature representation, training methodology, and GNN architecture, with only the target labeling function varying across classification tasks. To demonstrate the generality of the proposed approach, we consider three representative algebraic properties: abelianity, nilpotency, and solvability. Experiments were conducted on a benchmark of 176 finite groups drawn from several classical families, with all groups included in each classification task. To address class imbalance, class-weighted cross-entropy loss was employed where appropriate during training. Furthermore, the family PSL(2,q) was reserved exclusively for testing, enabling evaluation of the framework's ability to generalize to previously unseen group families. The best-performing models achieved test balanced accuracies of 1.000, 0.856, and 0.875 for abelianity, nilpotency, and solvability, respectively. Although the same computational framework was employed across all tasks, different GNN architectures proved optimal for different algebraic properties, suggesting that the representational complexity required to learn a property depends on its underlying algebraic structure. These results demonstrate that GNNs can effectively learn multiple algebraic properties directly from Cayley graph representations while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen group families. More broadly, the proposed framework establishes a computational methodology for studying algebraic properties of finite groups using graph-based machine learning.