Chongyang Xu

h-index2
2papers
85citations

2 Papers

5.8LGMar 31
Causality-inspired Federated Learning for Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs

Yuxuan Liu, Wenchao Xu, Haozhao Wang et al.

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for decentralized training of graph neural networks while preserving data privacy. However, existing FGL methods are predominantly designed for static graphs and rely on parameter averaging or distribution alignment, which implicitly assume that all features are equally transferable across clients, overlooking both the spatial and temporal heterogeneity and the presence of client-specific knowledge in real-world graphs. In this work, we identify that such assumptions create a vicious cycle of spurious representation entanglement, client-specific interference, and negative transfer, degrading generalization performance in Federated Learning over Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs (FSTG). To address this issue, we propose a novel causality-inspired framework named SC-FSGL, which explicitly decouples transferable causal knowledge from client-specific noise through representation-level interventions. Specifically, we introduce a Conditional Separation Module that simulates soft interventions through client conditioned masks, enabling the disentanglement of invariant spatio-temporal causal factors from spurious signals and mitigating representation entanglement caused by client heterogeneity. In addition, we propose a Causal Codebook that clusters causal prototypes and aligns local representations via contrastive learning, promoting cross-client consistency and facilitating knowledge sharing across diverse spatio-temporal patterns. Experiments on five diverse heterogeneity Spatio-Temporal Graph (STG) datasets show that SC-FSGL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

1.2DCFeb 2
Grappa: Gradient-Only Communication for Scalable Graph Neural Network Training

Chongyang Xu, Christoph Siebenbrunner, Laurent Bindschaedler

Cross-partition edges dominate the cost of distributed GNN training: fetching remote features and activations per iteration overwhelms the network as graphs deepen and partition counts grow. Grappa is a distributed GNN training framework that enforces gradient-only communication: during each iteration, partitions train in isolation and exchange only gradients for the global update. To recover accuracy lost to isolation, Grappa (i) periodically repartitions to expose new neighborhoods and (ii) applies a lightweight coverage-corrected gradient aggregation inspired by importance sampling. We prove the corrected estimator is asymptotically unbiased under standard support and boundedness assumptions, and we derive a batch-level variant for compatibility with common deep-learning packages that minimizes mean-squared deviation from the ideal node-level correction. We also introduce a shrinkage version that improves stability in practice. Empirical results on real and synthetic graphs show that Grappa trains GNNs 4 times faster on average (up to 13 times) than state-of-the-art systems, achieves better accuracy especially for deeper models, and sustains training at the trillion-edge scale on commodity hardware. Grappa is model-agnostic, supports full-graph and mini-batch training, and does not rely on high-bandwidth interconnects or caching.