Unsupervised Federated Graph Learning

Lele Fu, Tianchi Liao, Sheng Huang, Bowen Deng, zhangchuanfu, Shirui Pan, Chuan Chen

Keywords: Federated Learning, Graph Learning, Unsupervised Learning

Abstract:

Federated graph learning (FGL) is a privacy-preserving paradigm for modeling distributed graph data, designed to train a powerful global graph neural network.
Existing FGL methods predominantly rely on label information during training, effective FGL in an unsupervised setting remains largely unexplored territory.
In this paper, we address two key challenges in unsupervised FGL: 1) Local models tend to converge in divergent directions due to the lack of shared semantic information across clients. Then, how to align representation spaces among multiple clients is the first challenge.
2) Conventional federated weighted aggregation easily results in degrading the performance of the global model, then which raises another challenge, namely how to adaptively learn the global model parameters.
In response to the two questions, we propose a tailored framework named FedPAM, which is composed of two modules:
Representation Space Alignment (RSA) and Adaptive Global Parameter Learning (AGPL).
RSA leverages a set of learnable anchors to define the global representation space, then local subgraphs are aligned with them through the fused Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport, achieving the representation space alignment across clients.
AGPL stacks local model parameters into third-order tensors, and adaptively integrates the global model parameters in a low-rank tensor space, which facilitates to fuse the high-order knowledge among clients.
Extensive experiments on eight graph datasets are conducted, the results demonstrate that the proposed FedPAM is superior over classical and SOTA compared methods.

Primary Area: General machine learning (supervised, unsupervised, online, active, etc.)

Submission Number: 20133