Federated Graph Learning with Graphless Clients

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) is tasked with training machine learning models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), for multiple clients, each with its own graph data. Existing methods usually assume that each client has both node features and graph structure of its graph data. In real-world scenarios, however, there exist federated systems where only a part of the clients have such data while other clients (i.e. graphless clients) may only have node features. This naturally leads to a novel problem in FGL: how to jointly train a model over distributed graph data with graphless clients? In this paper, we propose a novel framework FedGLS to tackle the problem in FGL with graphless clients. In FedGLS, we devise a local graph learner on each graphless client which learns the local graph structure with the structure knowledge transferred from other clients. To enable structure knowledge transfer, we design a GNN model and a feature encoder on each client. During local training, the feature encoder retains the local graph structure knowledge together with the GNN model via knowledge distillation, and the structure knowledge is transferred among clients in global update. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FedGLS over five baselines.