Collaborate to Adapt: Source-Free Graph Domain Adaptation via Bi-directional Adaptation
This addresses domain adaptation for graph data in privacy-sensitive real-world settings, representing a novel paradigm rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles source-free unsupervised graph domain adaptation, where labeled source graphs are inaccessible, by introducing GraphCTA, a method that collaboratively adapts the model and graph structure, achieving significant performance improvements over existing baselines.
Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) has emerged as a practical solution to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source graph to a completely unlabelled target graph. However, most methods require a labelled source graph to provide supervision signals, which might not be accessible in the real-world settings due to regulations and privacy concerns. In this paper, we explore the scenario of source-free unsupervised graph domain adaptation, which tries to address the domain adaptation problem without accessing the labelled source graph. Specifically, we present a novel paradigm called GraphCTA, which performs model adaptation and graph adaptation collaboratively through a series of procedures: (1) conduct model adaptation based on node's neighborhood predictions in target graph considering both local and global information; (2) perform graph adaptation by updating graph structure and node attributes via neighborhood contrastive learning; and (3) the updated graph serves as an input to facilitate the subsequent iteration of model adaptation, thereby establishing a collaborative loop between model adaptation and graph adaptation. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on various public datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms recent source-free baselines by large margins.