LGAug 5, 2025

Online Continual Graph Learning

arXiv:2508.03283v11 citationsh-index: 54
Originality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis

This work addresses the need for efficient online predictions on dynamic graphs, but it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new setting.

The authors tackled the problem of online continual learning on evolving graphs by proposing a general formulation and benchmarks, reporting performance of adapted methods.

The aim of Continual Learning (CL) is to learn new tasks incrementally while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Online Continual Learning (OCL) specifically focuses on learning efficiently from a continuous stream of data with shifting distribution. While recent studies explore Continual Learning on graphs exploiting Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), only few of them focus on a streaming setting. Yet, many real-world graphs evolve over time, often requiring timely and online predictions. Current approaches, however, are not well aligned with the standard OCL setting, partly due to the lack of a clear definition of online Continual Learning on graphs. In this work, we propose a general formulation for online Continual Learning on graphs, emphasizing the efficiency requirements on batch processing over the graph topology, and providing a well-defined setting for systematic model evaluation. Finally, we introduce a set of benchmarks and report the performance of several methods in the CL literature, adapted to our setting.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

Your Notes