Improving Generalization of Dynamic Graph Learning via Environment Prompt

Kuo Yang, Zhengyang Zhou, Qihe Huang, Limin Li, Yuxuan Liang, Yang Wang

Keywords: Dynamic graph, spatio-temporal graph learning, out-of-distribution generalization, causal theory, prompt learning, subgraph learning.

TL;DR: Our work aims to design a powerful spatio-temporal OOD framework that can comprehensively achieve the inference and exploitation of unseen environments.

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization issue is a well-known challenge within deep learning tasks. In dynamic graphs, the change of temporal environments is regarded as the main cause of data distribution shift. While numerous OOD studies focusing on environment factors have achieved remarkable performance, they still fail to systematically solve the two issue of environment inference and utilization. In this work, we propose a novel dynamic graph learning model named EpoD based on prompt learning and structural causal model to comprehensively enhance both environment inference and utilization. Inspired by the superior performance of prompt learning in understanding underlying semantic and causal associations, we first design a self-prompted learning mechanism to infer unseen environment factors. We then rethink the role of environment variable within spatio-temporal causal structure model, and introduce a novel causal pathway where dynamic subgraphs serve as mediating variables. The extracted dynamic subgraph can effectively capture the data distribution shift by incorporating the inferred environment variables into the node-wise dependencies. Theoretical discussions and intuitive analysis support the generalizability and interpretability of EpoD. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets across domains showcase the superiority of EpoD against baselines, and toy example experiments further verify the powerful interpretability and rationality of our EpoD.

Primary Area: Deep learning architectures

Submission Number: 4911