Federated Graph-Level Clustering Network with Dual Knowledge Separation

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission275 Authors

Keywords: Clustering, Deep Graph Learning, Unsupervised Learning

Abstract:

Federated Graph-level Clustering (FGC) offers a promising framework for analyzing distributed graph data while ensuring privacy protection.
However, existing methods fail to simultaneously consider knowledge heterogeneity across intra- and inter-client, and still attempt to share as much knowledge as possible, resulting in consensus failure in the server.
To solve these issues, we propose a novel **F**ederated **G**raph-level **C**lustering **N**etwork with **D**ual **K**nowledge **S**eparation (FGCN-DKS).
The core idea is to decouple differentiated subgraph patterns and optimize them separately on the client, and then leverage cluster-oriented patterns to guide personalized knowledge aggregation on the server.
Specifically, on the client, we separate personalized variant subgraphs and cluster-oriented invariant subgraphs for each graph. Then the former are retained locally for further refinement of the clustering process, while pattern digests are extracted from the latter for uploading to the server.
On the server, we calculate the relation of inter-cluster patterns to adaptively aggregate cluster-oriented prototypes and parameters. Finally, the server generates personalized guidance signals for each cluster of clients, which are then fed back to local clients to enhance overall clustering performance.
Extensive experiments on multiple graph benchmark datasets have proven the superiority of the proposed FGCN-DKS over the SOTA methods.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 275