Empowering GNNs for Domain Adaptation via Denoising Target Graph

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20310 Authors

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks; Graph Domain Adaption

Abstract:

We explore the node classification task in the context of graph domain adaptation, which uses both source and target graph structures along with source labels to enhance the generalization capabilities of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on target graphs.
Structure domain shifts frequently occur, especially when graph data are collected at different times or from varying areas, resulting in poor performance of GNNs on target graphs. Surprisingly, we find that simply incorporating an auxiliary loss function for denoising graph edges on target graphs can be extremely effective in enhancing GNN performance on target graphs.
Based on this insight, we propose our framework, GraphDeT, a framework that integrates this auxiliary edge task into GNN training for node classification under domain adaptation. Our theoretical analysis connects this auxiliary edge task to the graph generalization bound with $\mathcal{A}$-distance, demonstrating such auxiliary task can imposes a constraint which tightens the bound and thereby improves generalization. The experimental results demonstrate superior performance compared to the existing baselines in handling both time and regional domain graph shifts.

Primary Area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies

Submission Number: 20310