LDC-GAT: A Lyapunov-Stable Graph Attention Network with Dynamic Filtering and Constraint-Aware Optimization

Graph attention networks are pivotal for modeling non-Euclidean data, yet they face dual challenges: training oscillations induced by projection-based high-dimensional constraints and gradient anomalies due to poor adaptation to heterophilic structure. To address these issues, we propose LDC-GAT (Lyapunov-Stable Graph Attention Network with Dynamic Filtering and Constraint-Aware Optimization), which jointly optimizes both forward and backward propagation processes. In the forward path, we introduce Dynamic Residual Graph Filtering, which integrates a tunable self-loop coefficient to balance neighborhood aggregation and self-feature retention. This filtering mechanism, constrained by a lower bound on Dirichlet energy, improves multi-head attention via multi-scale fusion and mitigates overfitting. In the backward path, we design the Fro-FWNAdam, a gradient descent algorithm guided by a learning-rate-aware perceptron. An explicit Frobenius norm bound on weights is derived from Lyapunov theory to form the basis of the perceptron. This stability-aware optimizer is embedded within a Frank–Wolfe framework with Nesterov acceleration, yielding a projection-free constrained optimization strategy that stabilizes training dynamics. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that LDC-GAT outperforms GAT by 10.54% in classification accuracy, which demonstrates strong robustness on heterophilic graphs.