During each message-passing iteration in a GNN, a hidden embedding $h^{(k)}_u$ corresponding to each node $u \in V$ is updated according to information aggregated from $u$’s graph neighborhood $N(u)$

the message-passing update can be expressed by:

$h^{(k+1)}_u = UPDATE^{(k)}(h^{(k)}_u, AGGREGATE^{(k)}(\{h^{(k)}_u, \forall v \in N(u)\})$
...

$h^{(k+1)}_u = UPDATE^{(k)}(h^{(k)}_u, m^{(k)}_{N(u)})$

where $UPDATE$ and $AGGREGATE$ are arbituary differentiable functions (neural networks) and $m_{N(u)}$ is the "message" that is aggregated from $u$'s graph neighborhood $N(u)$