Graph Learning in the Era of LLMs: A Survey from the Perspective of Data, Models, and Tasks

With the increasing prevalence of cross-domain Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) Data (e.g., citation networks, recommendation systems, social networks, and ai4science), the integration of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) into a unified Model architecture (e.g., LLM as enhancer, LLM as collaborators, LLM as predictor) has emerged as a promising technological paradigm. The core of this new graph learning paradigm lies in the synergistic combination of GNNs' ability to capture complex structural relationships and LLMs' proficiency in understanding informative contexts from the rich textual descriptions of graphs. Therefore, we can leverage graph description texts with rich semantic context to fundamentally enhance Data quality, thereby improving the representational capacity of model-centric approaches in line with data-centric machine learning principles. By leveraging the strengths of these distinct neural network architectures, this integrated approach addresses a wide range of TAG-based Task (e.g., graph learning, graph reasoning, and graph question answering), particularly in complex industrial scenarios (e.g., supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings). In other words, we can treat text as a medium to enable cross-domain generalization of graph learning Model, allowing a single graph model to effectively handle the diversity of downstream graph-based Task across different data domains. This work serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners looking to advance graph learning methodologies in the rapidly evolving landscape of LLM. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at \url{https://github.com/xkLi-Allen/Awesome-GNN-in-LLMs-Papers}.

OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmarks for Federated Graph Learning

Federated graph learning (FGL) has emerged as a promising distributed training paradigm for graph neural networks across multiple local systems without direct data sharing. This approach is particularly beneficial in privacy-sensitive scenarios and offers a new perspective on addressing scalability challenges in large-scale graph learning. Despite the proliferation of FGL, the diverse motivations from practical applications, spanning various research backgrounds and experimental settings, pose a significant challenge to fair evaluation. To fill this gap, we propose OpenFGL, a unified benchmark designed for the primary FGL scenarios: Graph-FL and Subgraph-FL. Specifically, OpenFGL includes 38 graph datasets from 16 application domains, 8 federated data simulation strategies that emphasize graph properties, and 5 graph-based downstream tasks. Additionally, it offers 18 recently proposed SOTA FGL algorithms through a user-friendly API, enabling a thorough comparison and comprehensive evaluation of their effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate the ability of FGL while also revealing its potential limitations, offering valuable insights for future exploration in this thriving field.

FedTAD: Topology-aware Data-free Knowledge Distillation for Subgraph Federated Learning

Subgraph federated learning (subgraph-FL) is a new distributed paradigm that facilitates the collaborative training of graph neural networks (GNNs) by multi-client subgraphs. Unfortunately, a significant challenge of subgraph-FL arises from subgraph heterogeneity, which stems from node and topology variation, causing the impaired performance of the global GNN. Despite various studies, they have not yet thoroughly investigated the impact mechanism of subgraph heterogeneity. To this end, we decouple node and topology variation, revealing that they correspond to differences in label distribution and structure homophily. Remarkably, these variations lead to significant differences in the class-wise knowledge reliability of multiple local GNNs, misguiding the model aggregation with varying degrees. Building on this insight, we propose topology-aware data-free knowledge distillation technology (FedTAD), enhancing reliable knowledge transfer from the local model to the global model. Extensive experiments on six public datasets consistently demonstrate the superiority of FedTAD over state-of-the-art baselines.

Rethinking Node-wise Propagation for Large-scale Graph Learning

Scalable graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising technique, which exhibits superior predictive performance and high running efficiency across numerous large-scale graph-based web applications. However, (i) Most scalable GNNs tend to treat all nodes in graphs with the same propagation rules, neglecting their topological uniqueness; (ii) Existing node-wise propagation optimization strategies are insufficient on web-scale graphs with intricate topology, where a full portrayal of nodes' local properties is required. Intuitively, different nodes in web-scale graphs possess distinct topological roles, and therefore propagating them indiscriminately or neglect local contexts may compromise the quality of node representations. This intricate topology in web-scale graphs cannot be matched by small-scale scenarios. To address the above issues, we propose \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{T}opology-aware \textbf{P}ropagation (ATP), which reduces potential high-bias propagation and extracts structural patterns of each node in a scalable manner to improve running efficiency and predictive performance. Remarkably, ATP is crafted to be a plug-and-play node-wise propagation optimization strategy, allowing for offline execution independent of the graph learning process in a new perspective. Therefore, this approach can be seamlessly integrated into most scalable GNNs while remain orthogonal to existing node-wise propagation optimization strategies. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets, including the most representative large-scale ogbn-papers100M, have demonstrated the effectiveness of ATP. Specifically, ATP has proven to be efficient in improving the performance of prevalent scalable GNNs for semi-supervised node classification while addressing redundant computational costs.

Towards Effective and General Graph Unlearning via Mutual Evolution

With the rapid advancement of AI applications, the growing needs for data privacy and model robustness have highlighted the importance of machine unlearning, especially in thriving graph-based scenarios. However, most existing graph unlearning strategies primarily rely on well-designed architectures or manual process, rendering them less user-friendly and posing challenges in terms of deployment efficiency. Furthermore, striking a balance between unlearning performance and framework generalization is also a pivotal concern. To address the above issues, we propose \underline{\textbf{M}}utual \underline{\textbf{E}}volution \underline{\textbf{G}}raph \underline{\textbf{U}}nlearning (MEGU), a new mutual evolution paradigm that simultaneously evolves the predictive and unlearning capacities of graph unlearning. By incorporating aforementioned two components, MEGU ensures complementary optimization in a unified training framework that aligns with the prediction and unlearning requirements. Extensive experiments on 9 graph benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MEGU in addressing unlearning requirements at the feature, node, and edge levels. Specifically, MEGU achieves average performance improvements of 2.7\%, 2.5\%, and 3.2\% across these three levels of unlearning tasks when compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, MEGU exhibits satisfactory training efficiency, reducing time and space overhead by an average of 159.8x and 9.6x, respectively, in comparison to retraining GNN from scratch.

FedGTA: Topology-aware Averaging for Federated Graph Learning

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training on large-scale subgraphs across multiple local systems. Existing FGL studies fall into two categories: (i) FGL Optimization, which improves multi-client training in existing machine learning models; (ii) FGL Model, which enhances performance with complex local models and multi-client interactions. However, most FGL optimization strategies are designed specifically for the computer vision domain and ignore graph structure, presenting dissatisfied performance and slow convergence. Meanwhile, complex local model architectures in FGL Models studies lack scalability for handling large-scale subgraphs and have deployment limitations. To address these issues, we propose Federated Graph Topology-aware Aggregation (FedGTA), a personalized optimization strategy that optimizes through topology-aware local smoothing confidence and mixed neighbor features. During experiments, we deploy FedGTA in 12 multi-scale real-world datasets with the Louvain and Metis split. This allows us to evaluate the performance and robustness of FedGTA across a range of scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedGTA achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting high scalability and efficiency. The experiment includes ogbn-papers100M, the most representative large-scale graph database so that we can verify the applicability of our method to large-scale graph learning. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to bridge large-scale graph learning with FGL using this optimization strategy, contributing to the development of efficient and scalable FGL methods.

AdaFGL: A New Paradigm for Federated Node Classification with Topology Heterogeneity

Recently, Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has attracted significant attention as a distributed framework based on graph neural networks, primarily due to its capability to break data silos. Existing FGL studies employ community split on the homophilous global graph by default to simulate federated semi-supervised node classification settings. Such a strategy assumes the consistency of topology between the multi-client subgraphs and the global graph, where connected nodes are highly likely to possess similar feature distributions and the same label. However, in real-world implementations, the varying perspectives of local data engineering result in various subgraph topologies, posing unique heterogeneity challenges in FGL. Unlike the well-known label Non-independent identical distribution (Non-iid) problems in federated learning, FGL heterogeneity essentially reveals the topological divergence among multiple clients, namely homophily or heterophily. To simulate and handle this unique challenge, we introduce the concept of structure Non-iid split and then present a new paradigm called \underline{Ada}ptive \underline{F}ederated \underline{G}raph \underline{L}earning (AdaFGL), a decoupled two-step personalized approach. To begin with, AdaFGL employs standard multi-client federated collaborative training to acquire the federated knowledge extractor by aggregating uploaded models in the final round at the server. Then, each client conducts personalized training based on the local subgraph and the federated knowledge extractor. Extensive experiments on the 12 graph benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of AdaFGL over state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, in terms of test accuracy, our proposed AdaFGL outperforms baselines by significant margins of 3.24\% and 5.57\% on community split and structure Non-iid split, respectively.

LightDiC: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Large-scale Digraph Representation Learning

Most existing graph neural networks (GNNs) are limited to undirected graphs, whose restricted scope of the captured relational information hinders their expressive capabilities and deployments in real-world scenarios. Compared with undirected graphs, directed graphs (digraphs) fit the demand for modeling more complex topological systems by capturing more intricate relationships between nodes, such as formulating transportation and financial networks. While some directed GNNs have been introduced, their inspiration mainly comes from deep learning architectures, which lead to redundant complexity and computation, making them inapplicable to large-scale databases. To address these issues, we propose LightDiC, a scalable variant of the digraph convolution based on the magnetic Laplacian. Since topology-related computations are conducted solely during offline pre-processing, LightDiC achieves exceptional scalability, enabling downstream predictions to be trained separately without incurring recursive computational costs. Theoretical analysis shows that LightDiC utilizes directed information to achieve message passing based on the complex field, which corresponds to the proximal gradient descent process of the Dirichlet energy optimization function from the perspective of digraph signal denoising, ensuring its expressiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that LightDiC performs comparably well or even outperforms other SOTA methods in various downstream tasks, with fewer learnable parameters and higher training efficiency. Notably, LightDiC is the first DiGNN to provide satisfactory results in the most representative large-scale database (ogbn-papers100M).

Breaking the Entanglement of Homophily and Heterophily in Semi-supervised Node Classification

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown prominent performance in semi-supervised node classification by leveraging knowledge from the graph database. However, most existing GNNs follow the homophily assumption, where connected nodes are more likely to exhibit similar feature distributions and the same labels, and such an assumption has proven to be vulnerable in a growing number of practical applications. As a supplement, heterophily reflects dissimilarity in connected nodes, which has gained significant attention in graph learning. To this end, data engineers aim to develop a powerful GNN model that can ensure performance under both homophily and heterophily. Despite numerous attempts, most existing GNNs struggle to achieve optimal node representations due to the constraints of undirected graphs. The neglect of directed edges results in sub-optimal graph representations, thereby hindering the capacity of GNNs. To address this issue, we introduce AMUD, which quantifies the relationship between node profiles and topology from a statistical perspective, offering valuable insights for \underline{A}daptively \underline{M}odeling the natural directed graphs as the \underline{U}ndirected or \underline{D}irected graph to maximize the benefits from subsequent graph learning. Furthermore, we propose \underline{A}daptive \underline{D}irected \underline{P}attern \underline{A}ggregation (ADPA) as a new directed graph learning paradigm for AMUD. Empirical studies have demonstrated that AMUD guides efficient graph learning. Meanwhile, extensive experiments on 14 benchmark datasets substantiate the impressive performance of ADPA, outperforming baselines by significant margins of 3.96\%.