Graph Domain Adaptation Does Not End with Representation Learning

arXiv:2609.25692 · cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-22 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-22

Updated: 2026-09-26

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Graph domain adaptation (GDA) transfers knowledge from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph under shifts in both node attributes and graph structure.

Terminology

Abstract

Graph domain adaptation (GDA) transfers knowledge from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph under shifts in both node attributes and graph structure. Existing methods primarily adapt graph representations through propagation redesign, distribution alignment, or source-to-target transition modeling, but still rely on a single graph-propagating path for target prediction. This leaves open whether an adapted graph representation exhausts the predictive evidence available in the target domain, since the graph-aware expert and graph-free local expert may exhibit different failure modes under topological shifts. To address this limitation, we propose EviGDA, an Evidence-Augmented Graph Domain Adaptation framework that complements graph representation adaptation with a graph-free local expert. The graph-aware expert performs message passing and entropy-aware marginal alignment, while the graph-free local expert learns solely from source node features and labels without graph propagation or target alignment. The two experts are optimized independently and combined only at inference through a task-level constant probability mixture, preserving complementary evidence without joint training, learned routing, or target pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on ten datasets and 16 transfer tasks show that EviGDA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

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