Papers › Smoothness Really Matters: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Unsupervised Graph...

Smoothness Really Matters: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation

16 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.11654archive 2025-07-28

Wei Chen, Guo Ye, Yakun Wang, Zhao Zhang, Libang Zhang, Daixin Wang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Fuzhen Zhuang

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) seeks to bridge distribution shifts between domains by transferring knowledge from labeled source graphs to given unlabeled target graphs. Existing UGDA methods primarily focus on aligning features in the latent space learned by graph neural networks (GNNs) across domains, often overlooking structural shifts, resulting in limited effectiveness when addressing structurally complex transfer scenarios. Given the sensitivity of GNNs to local structural features, even slight discrepancies between source and target graphs could lead to significant shifts in node embeddings, thereby reducing the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach for UGDA called Target-Domain Structural Smoothing (TDSS). TDSS is a simple and effective method designed to perform structural smoothing directly on the target graph, thereby mitigating structural distribution shifts and ensuring the consistency of node representations. Specifically, by integrating smoothing techniques with neighborhood sampling, TDSS maintains the structural coherence of the target graph while mitigating the risk of over-smoothing. Our theoretical analysis shows that TDSS effectively reduces target risk by improving model smoothness. Empirical results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that TDSS outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines, achieving significant improvements across six transfer scenarios. The code is available in https://github.com/cwei01/TDSS.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

cwei01/tdss officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Domain AdaptationGRAPH DOMAIN ADAPTATIONTransfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Focus

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections