PLACE: Prompt Learning for Attributed Community Search
This work addresses the challenge of efficiently and accurately identifying communities in attributed graphs, which is incremental as it adapts prompt-tuning from NLP to graph contexts.
The paper tackles the problem of attributed community search (ACS) by proposing PLACE, a graph prompt learning framework that integrates learnable prompt tokens to refine queries, achieving an average 22% higher F1 scores compared to state-of-the-art methods on 9 real-world graphs.
In this paper, we propose PLACE (Prompt Learning for Attributed Community Search), an innovative graph prompt learning framework for ACS. Enlightened by prompt-tuning in Natural Language Processing (NLP), where learnable prompt tokens are inserted to contextualize NLP queries, PLACE integrates structural and learnable prompt tokens into the graph as a query-dependent refinement mechanism, forming a prompt-augmented graph. Within this prompt-augmented graph structure, the learned prompt tokens serve as a bridge that strengthens connections between graph nodes for the query, enabling the GNN to more effectively identify patterns of structural cohesiveness and attribute similarity related to the specific query. We employ an alternating training paradigm to optimize both the prompt parameters and the GNN jointly. Moreover, we design a divide-and-conquer strategy to enhance scalability, supporting the model to handle million-scale graphs. Extensive experiments on 9 real-world graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of PLACE for three types of ACS queries, where PLACE achieves higher F1 scores by 22% compared to the state-of-the-arts on average.