graph neural network
Graph Few-Shot Learning via Adaptive Spectrum Experts and Cross-Set Distribution Calibration
Graph few-shot learning has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to rapidly adapt models to new tasks with only limited labeled nodes. Despite the remarkable progress made by existing graph few-shot learning methods, several key limitations remain. First, most current approaches rely on predefined and unified graph filters (e.g., low-pass or high-pass filters) to globally enhance or suppress node frequency signals. Such fixed spectral operations fail to account for the heterogeneity of local topological structures inherent in real-world graphs. Moreover, these methods often assume that the support and query sets are drawn from the same distribution. However, under few-shot conditions, the limited labeled data in the support set may not sufficiently capture the complex distribution of the query set, leading to suboptimal generalization.
Dynamic Bundling with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Inference on Text-Attributed Graphs
Large language models (LLMs) have been used in many zero-shot learning problems, with their strong generalization ability. Recently, adopting LLMs in textattributed graphs (TAGs) has drawn increasing attention. However, the adoption of LLMs faces two major challenges: limited information on graph structure and unreliable responses. LLMs struggle with text attributes isolated from the graph topology. Worse still, they yield unreliable predictions due to both information insufficiency and the inherent weakness of LLMs (e.g., hallucination). Towards this end, this paper proposes a novel method named Dynamic Text Bundling Supervision (DENSE) that queries LLMs with bundles of texts to obtain bundle-level labels and uses these labels to supervise graph neural networks.
Return of ChebNet: Understanding and Improving an Overlooked GNN on Long-Range Tasks
ChebNet, one of the earliest spectral GNNs, has largely been overshadowed by Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), which gained popularity for their simplicity and effectiveness in capturing local graph structure. Despite their success, MPNNs are limited in their ability to capture long-range dependencies between nodes. This has led researchers to adapt MPNNs through rewiring or make use of Graph Transformers, which compromises the computational efficiency that characterized early spatial message-passing architectures, and typically disregards the graph structure. Almost a decade after its original introduction, we revisit ChebNet to shed light on its ability to model distant node interactions. We find that out-of-box, ChebNet already shows competitive advantages relative to classical MPNNs and GTs on long-range benchmarks, while maintaining good scalability properties for high-order polynomials. However, we uncover that this polynomial expansion leads ChebNet to an unstable regime during training. To address this limitation, we cast ChebNet as a stable and non-dissipative dynamical system, which we coin Stable-ChebNet. Our Stable-ChebNetmodel allows for stable information propagation, and has controllable dynamics which do not require the use of eigendecompositions, positional encodings, or graph rewiring.
Coloring Learning for Heterophilic Graph Representation
Graph self-supervised learning aims to learn the intrinsic graph representations from unlabeled data, with broad applicability in areas such as computing networks. Although graph contrastive learning (GCL) has achieved remarkable progress by generating perturbed views via data augmentation and optimizing sample similarity, it performs poorly in heterophilic graph scenarios (where connected nodes are likely to belong to different classes or exhibit dissimilar features). In heterophilic graphs, existing methods typically rely on random or carefully designed augmentation strategies (e.g., edge dropping) for contrastive views. However, such graph structures exhibit intricate edge relationships, where topological perturbations may completely alter the semantics of neighborhoods. Moreover, most methods focus solely on local contrastive signals while neglecting global structural constraints. To address these limitations, inspired by graph coloring, we propose a novel Coloring learning for heterophilic graph Representation framework, CoRep, which: 1) Pioneers a coloring classifier to generate coloring labels, explicitly minimizing the discrepancy between homophilic nodes while maximizing that of heterophilic nodes. A global positive sample set is constructed using multi-hop same-color nodes to capture global semantic consistency.
Enhancing Graph Classification Robustness with Singular Pooling
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved strong performance across a range of graph representation learning tasks, yet their adversarial robustness in graph classification remains underexplored compared to node classification. While most existing defenses focus on the message-passing component, this work investigates the overlooked role of pooling operations in shaping robustness. We present a theoretical analysis of standard flat pooling methods (sum, average and max), deriving upper bounds on their adversarial risk and identifying their vulnerabilities under different attack scenarios and graph structures. Motivated by these insights, we propose Robust Singular Pooling (RS-Pool), a novel pooling strategy that leverages the dominant singular vector of the node embedding matrix to construct a robust graph-level representation. We theoretically investigate the robustness of RS-Pool and interpret the resulting bound leading to improved understanding of our proposed pooling operator. While our analysis centers on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), RS-Pool is model-agnostic and can be implemented efficiently via power iteration. Empirical results on real-world benchmarks show that RS-Pool provides better robustness than the considered pooling methods when subject to state-of-the-art adversarial attacks while maintaining competitive clean accuracy. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/king/rs-pool.
Appendix ABroader Impacts
The proposed research on pre-training temporal graph neural networks across multiple networks has the potential to advance the field of machine learning and its applications significantly. By introducing methodologies to enhance the scalability and transferability of TGNNs, this work could revolutionize areas like network security, financial fraud detection, and real-time social network analysis, where dynamic and adaptive models are essential. The publicly available dataset of 84 Ethereum-based temporal networks will serve as a valuable resource for the research community, fostering innovation and collaboration. Furthermore, the principles of multi-network pre-training introduced here can inspire analogous advances in other temporal data domains, such as healthcare, transportation, and climate science. This research opens up a new direction in training generalizable temporal graph models that, for the first time, can be trained on distinct temporal networks, paving the way for Temporal Graph Foundation Models. This work also introduces a set of Ethereum transaction token networks, which are publicly available to users who have the necessary resources, such as fast SSDs, large RAM, and ample disk space, to synchronize Ethereum clients and manually extract blocks. Additionally, all Ethereum data is accessible on numerous Ethereum explorer sites such as etherscan.io. An Ethereum user's privacy depends on whether personally identifiable information (PII) is associated with any of their blockchain address, which serves as account handles and are considered pseudonymous. If such PII were obtained from other sources, our datasets could potentially be used to link Ethereum addresses. However, real-life identities can only be discovered using IP tracking information, which we neither have nor share. Our data does not contain any PII. Furthermore, we have developed a request to exclude an address from the dataset. Benchmark datasets have become fundamental for advancing graph machine learning, providing a common ground to evaluate models and facilitate the development of graph foundation models. Early graph ML studies often relied on a handful of small, static benchmark graphs (e.g., citation networks like Cora/Citeseer and molecular graphs from the TU collection [37]).
MiNT: Multi-Network Transfer Benchmark for Temporal Graph Learning
Temporal Graph Learning (TGL) aims to discover patterns in evolving networks or temporal graphs and leverage these patterns to predict future interactions. However, most existing research focuses on learning from a single network in isolation, leaving the challenges of within-domain and cross-domain generalization largely unaddressed. In this study, we introduce a new benchmark of 84 real-world temporal transaction networks and propose Temporal Multi-network Transfer (MiNT), a pre-training framework designed to capture transferable temporal dynamics across diverse networks. We train MiNT models on up to 64 transaction networks and evaluate their generalization ability on 20 held-out, unseen networks. Our results show that MiNT consistently outperforms individually trained models, revealing a strong relation between the number of pre-training networks and transfer performance. These findings highlight scaling trends in temporal graph learning and underscore the importance of network diversity in improving generalization. This work establishes the first large-scale benchmark for studying transferability in TGL and lays the groundwork for developing Temporal Graph Foundation Models.
The Underappreciated Power of Vision Models for Graph Structural Understanding
Graph Neural Networks operate through bottom-up message-passing, fundamentally differing from human visual perception, which intuitively captures global structures first. We investigate the underappreciated potential of vision models for graph understanding, finding they achieve performance comparable to GNNs on established benchmarks while exhibiting distinctly different learning patterns. These divergent behaviors, combined with limitations of existing benchmarks that conflate domain features with topological understanding, motivate our introduction of GraphAbstract. This benchmark evaluates models' ability to perceive global graph properties as humans do: recognizing organizational archetypes, detecting symmetry, sensing connectivity strength, and identifying critical elements. Our results reveal that vision models significantly outperform GNNs on tasks requiring holistic structural understanding and maintain generalizability across varying graph scales, while GNNs struggle with global pattern abstraction and degrade with increasing graph size. This work demonstrates that vision models possess remarkable yet underutilized capabilities for graph structural understanding, particularly for problems requiring global topological awareness and scale-invariant reasoning. These findings open new avenues to leverage this underappreciated potential for developing more effective graph foundation models for tasks dominated by holistic pattern recognition.
Cross-Domain Graph Data Scaling: AShowcase with Diffusion Models
Models for natural language and images benefit from data scaling behavior: the more data fed into the model, the better they perform. This'better with more' phenomenon enables the effectiveness of large-scale pre-training on vast amounts of data. However, current graph pre-training methods struggle to scale up data due to heterogeneity across graphs. To achieve effective data scaling, we aim to develop a general model that is able to capture diverse data patterns of graphs and can be utilized to adaptively help the downstream tasks. To this end, we propose UniAug, a universal graph structure augmentor built on a diffusion model. We first pre-train a discrete diffusion model on thousands of graphs across domains to learn the graph structural patterns. In the downstream phase, we provide adaptive enhancement by conducting graph structure augmentation with the help of the pre-trained diffusion model via guided generation. By leveraging the pre-trained diffusion model for structure augmentation, we consistently achieve performance improvements across various downstream tasks in a plug-and-play manner. To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first demonstration of a data-scaling graph structure augmentor on graphs across domains.
Bridging Theory and Practice in Link Representation with Graph Neural Networks
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used to compute representations of node pairs for downstream tasks such as link prediction. Yet, theoretical understanding of their expressive power has focused almost entirely on graph-level representations. In this work, we shift the focus to links and provide the first comprehensive study of GNN expressiveness in link representation. We introduce a unifying framework, the kϕ-kρ-mframework, that subsumes existing messagepassing link models and enables formal expressiveness comparisons. Using this framework, we derive a hierarchy of state-of-the-art methods and offer theoretical tools to analyze future architectures. To complement our analysis, we propose a synthetic evaluation protocol comprising the first benchmark specifically designed to assess link-level expressiveness. Finally, we ask: does expressiveness matter in practice? We use a graph symmetry metric that quantifies the difficulty of distinguishing links and show that while expressive models may underperform on standard benchmarks, they significantly outperform simpler ones as symmetry increases, highlighting the need for dataset-aware model selection.