--Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown strong performance on graph-structured data, but their reliance on graph connectivity often limits scalability and efficiency. In this work, we integrate KANs into three popular GNN architectures --GA T, SGC, and APPNP --resulting in three new models: KGA T, KSGC, and KAPPNP . We further adopt a multi-teacher knowledge amalgamation framework, where knowledge from multiple KAN-based GNNs is distilled into a graph-independent KAN student model. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed models improve node classification accuracy, and the knowledge amalgamation approach significantly boosts student model performance. Our findings highlight the potential of KANs for enhancing GNN expressiveness and for enabling efficient, graph-free inference. With the rapid development of deep learning technologies, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in processing graph-structured data [1]. GNNs have been widely applied in social network analysis, recommendation systems, knowledge graphs, and bioinfor-matics.

Recently, there has been a growing availability of pre-trained text models on various model repositories. These models greatly reduce the cost of training new models from scratch as they can be fine-tuned for specific tasks or trained on large datasets. However, these datasets may not be publicly accessible due to the privacy, security, or intellectual property issues. In this paper, we aim to develop a lightweight student network that can learn from multiple teacher models without accessing their original training data. Hence, we investigate Data-Free Knowledge Amalgamation (DFKA), a knowledge-transfer task that combines insights from multiple pre-trained teacher models and transfers them effectively to a compact student network. To accomplish this, we propose STRATANET, a modeling framework comprising: (a) a steerable data generator that produces text data tailored to each teacher and (b) an amalgamation module that implements a self-regulative strategy using confidence estimates from the teachers' different layers to selectively integrate their knowledge and train a versatile student. We evaluate our method on three benchmark text classification datasets with varying labels or domains. Empirically, we demonstrate that the student model learned using our STRATANET outperforms several baselines significantly under data-driven and data-free constraints.

Catastrophic forgetting has been a significant problem hindering the deployment of deep learning algorithms in the continual learning setting. Numerous methods have been proposed to address the catastrophic forgetting problem where an agent loses its generalization power of old tasks while learning new tasks. We put forward an alternative strategy to handle the catastrophic forgetting with knowledge amalgamation (CFA), which learns a student network from multiple heterogeneous teacher models specializing in previous tasks and can be applied to current offline methods. The knowledge amalgamation process is carried out in a single-head manner with only a selected number of memorized samples and no annotations. The teachers and students do not need to share the same network structure, allowing heterogeneous tasks to be adapted to a compact or sparse data representation. We compare our method with competitive baselines from different strategies, demonstrating our approach's advantages.

As many fine-tuned pre-trained language models~(PLMs) with promising performance are generously released, investigating better ways to reuse these models is vital as it can greatly reduce the retraining computational cost and the potential environmental side-effects. In this paper, we explore a novel model reuse paradigm, Knowledge Amalgamation~(KA) for PLMs. Without human annotations available, KA aims to merge the knowledge from different teacher-PLMs, each of which specializes in a different classification problem, into a versatile student model. The achieve this, we design a Model Uncertainty--aware Knowledge Amalgamation~(MUKA) framework, which identifies the potential adequate teacher using Monte-Carlo Dropout for approximating the golden supervision to guide the student. Experimental results demonstrate that MUKA achieves substantial improvements over baselines on benchmark datasets. Further analysis shows that MUKA can generalize well under several complicate settings with multiple teacher models, heterogeneous teachers, and even cross-dataset teachers.

A massive number of well-trained deep networks have been released by developers online. These networks may focus on different tasks and in many cases are optimized for different datasets. In this paper, we study how to exploit such heterogeneous pre-trained networks, known as teachers, so as to train a customized student network that tackles a set of selective tasks defined by the user . W e assume no human annotations are available, and each teacher may be either single-or multi-task. T o this end, we introduce a dual-step strategy that first extracts the task-specific knowledge from the heterogeneous teachers sharing the same sub-task, and then amalgamates the extracted knowledge to build the student network. T o facilitate the training, we employ a selective learning scheme where, for each unlabelled sample, the student learns adaptively from only the teacher with the least prediction ambiguity. W e evaluate the proposed approach on several datasets and experimental results demonstrate that the student, learned by such adaptive knowledge amalgamation, achieves performances even better than those of the teachers.

An increasing number of well-trained deep networks have been released online by researchers and developers, enabling the community to reuse them in a plug-and-play way without accessing the training annotations. However, due to the large number of network variants, such public-available trained models are often of different architectures, each of which being tailored for a specific task or dataset. In this paper, we study a deep-model reusing task, where we are given as input pre-trained networks of heterogeneous architectures specializing in distinct tasks, as teacher models. We aim to learn a multitalented and light-weight student model that is able to grasp the integrated knowledge from all such heterogeneous-structure teachers, again without accessing any human annotation. To this end, we propose a common feature learning scheme, in which the features of all teachers are transformed into a common space and the student is enforced to imitate them all so as to amalgamate the intact knowledge. We test the proposed approach on a list of benchmarks and demonstrate that the learned student is able to achieve very promising performance, superior to those of the teachers in their specialized tasks.