Hypergraph knowledge distillation aims to retain the predictive performance of a hypergraph neural network (HNN) teacher while reducing inference costs through a lightweight student model. In this work, we observe that HNNs exhibit substantially lower prediction performance on heterophilic nodes connected through semantically diverse hyperedges, indicating that the reliability of teacher knowledge varies across nodes. Motivated by this observation, we propose HADES, a heterophily-aware adaptive distillation method for hypergraph neural networks. HADES quantifies node heterophily and leverages it as an estimate of teacher reliability to modulate the transfer of teacher knowledge during distillation. Experimental results on real-world hypergraphs demonstrate that HADES consistently improves student performance across different HNN teachers and distillation objectives. In many cases, the resulting student models surpass the predictive performance of their teachers while achieving up to 12.3 times faster inference.
The increasing prevalence of large-scale hypergraphs poses significant computational challenges for hypergraph neural network (HNN) training. To address this, hypergraph condensation (HGC) distills large real hypergraphs into compact yet informative synthetic ones, beyond graph condensation (GC) methods limited to pairwise relations. However, existing HGC methods rely on decoupled training architectures, where structure generators are pre-trained on the original hypergraph but not jointly optimized with condensed features during refinement, resulting in misaligned structures that degrade downstream utility. Moreover, trajectory-based optimization incurs substantial computational overhead in refinement, limiting condensation efficiency. To tackle these issues, we propose \textbf{A}nchor-guided \textbf{H}yper\textbf{G}raph \textbf{C}ondensation with \textbf{D}ual-level \textbf{D}iscrimination (\textbf{AHGCDD}), which consists of three key components: (1) a node initialization module based on Heat Kernel PageRank (HKPR) to encode structural knowledge into feature semantics; (2) an anchor-guided hyperedge synthesis strategy for joint optimization of condensed features and structure; (3) a theoretically grounded dual-level discrimination objective for utility-preserving condensation without redundant HNN training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of AHGCDD.
Graph condensation aims to produce a small surrogate graph that preserves the downstream node-classification performance of a much larger original graph. Existing methods rely on Weisfeiler-Lehman neighbourhood aggregation or gradient-based distribution matching, both of which assume that adjacent nodes share the same label, an assumption that breaks down under heterophily. We propose HERALD (High-fidelity Exemplar Retrieval with Adaptive Landmark Distillation), a gradient-free graph condensation framework that adapts the node scoring and feature selection in the condensation pipeline to the graph's measured heterophily. HERALD selects features via a joint Fisher-discriminability and activation-density criterion that down-weights aggregated representations on heterophilic graphs, and scores nodes by a weighted combination of prototype representativeness, decision-boundary proximity, and Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID), where the weights are driven by a smooth sigmoid function of the heterophily ratio. Nodes are then assembled into a condensed subgraph through score-ordered BFS expansion, Personalised PageRank pruning, and class rebalancing, all at an identical storage budget to BONSAI, enabling direct comparison. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets spanning homophilic and heterophilic settings show that HERALD matches or outperforms state-of-the-art condensers on heterophilic graphs and remains competitive on homophilic ones across four GNN architectures.
Many real-world heterogeneous graphs exhibit pronounced heterophily, where connected nodes often have dissimilar labels or play different semantic roles. In such settings, standard heterogeneous graph neural networks that aggregate messages along metapaths or meta-relations primarily based on feature similarity can propagate misleading information, since feature similarity may be misaligned with underlying relational semantics. In this paper, we propose HeterSEED, a semantics-structure decoupling framework for heterogeneous graph learning under heterophily. HeterSEED decouples representation learning into a heterogeneous semantic channel that captures type- and relation-aware local semantics and a structure-aware heterophily channel that separates homophilic and heterophilic neighborhoods via pseudo-label-guided partitioning and aggregates them using metapath-based structural weights. A node-level adaptive fusion mechanism then combines the two channels to produce context-dependent node representations. Theoretically, we establish that, on heterogeneous graphs under heterophily, HeterSEED is strictly more expressive than standard heterogeneous graph neural networks that rely primarily on feature similarity and provably reduces the prediction bias introduced by heterophilic neighbors. Experiments on five real-world heterogeneous graphs, including two large-scale networks at the million-node and hundred-million-edge scale, demonstrate that HeterSEED consistently outperforms representative heterogeneous graph neural networks and recent heterophily-aware baselines, especially in strongly heterophilic regimes.