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Shijian Xiao

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2 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Demystifying GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Transfer: Theoretical Grounding and Dual-Stream Distillation Method

Zhiyuan Yu
Mingkai Lin
Wenzhong Li
Zhangyue Yin
Shijian Xiao
Sanglu Lu

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable effectiveness across various applications, but their computational complexity poses significant scalability challenges. To this end, GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods transfer relational inductive biases from GNNs to MLPs, equipping MLPs with graph-aware capabilities that rival or even surpass those of their teacher GNNs. However, a theoretical foundation for understanding GNN-to-MLP KD is still missing. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of how knowledge distillation unlocks the potential of MLPs for graph tasks from the perspective of training dynamics. We demonstrate that label alignment in KD fundamentally reshapes the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) matrix of student MLPs, enabling them to learn the teacher model’s implicit graph bias. We further investigate finer-grained distillation paradigms and reveal that conventional layer-wise output alignment fails to effectively align the deep-layer graph propagation outcomes. To address this, we propose Dual-Stream Aligned MLP (DA-MLP), which incorporates complementary graph filters in a dual-stream architecture. This approach simultaneously enhances feature space dimensionality for improved representation alignment and preserves graph signals across different frequency bands. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate that DA-MLP can be seamlessly integrated into existing knowledge distillation frameworks for performance enhancements in both transductive and inductive settings.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Contextual Structure Knowledge Transfer for Graph Neural Networks

Zhiyuan Yu
Wenzhong Li
Zhangyue Yin
Xiaobin Hong
Shijian Xiao
Sanglu Lu

Graph transfer learning endeavors to develop a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model in a fully-labeled source domain, with the intention of deploying it on a target domain that has limited labeled data for inference. We reveal that prevalent graph transfer learning methods are susceptible to the homophily shift problem. This issue arises from the divergence in homophily structures between the source and target graphs, leading to a notable deterioration in the performance of GNN models. In this paper, we introduce a novel Contextual Structural Graph Neural Network (CS-GNN) method, leveraging a tailored attention mechanism to apprehend a variety of local structural cues, facilitating structural knowledge transfer across domains. It features an ego-network module to distill local structural diversity and a moment-based approach to gauge structural patterns without needing ground-truth labels. CS-GNN crafts a feature smoothness matrix from node attributes, guiding a customized attention mechanism for feature aggregation. A group-wise fairness loss is employed to balance learning across various structural patterns, enhancing the model's ability to transfer knowledge across domains. Comprehensive experiments conducted on six benchmark datasets substantiate the superiority of CS-GNN over the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating significant improvements in accuracy and robustness against homophily shifts.

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