Data-Efficient Agentic Graph Domain Adaptation via Reliability-Aware Prototype Learning
Authors: Yingxu Wang, Kunyu Zhang, Siyang Gao
Organizations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China · City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Agentic learning systems are often required to adapt after deployment by observing new data and reusing prior knowledge under limited supervision or feedback. For graph-structured prediction, Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) naturally instantiates this setting by transferring knowledge from labeled source graphs to unlabeled target graphs under distribution shifts. However, most GDA methods assume sufficient labeled source graphs, which becomes restrictive in data-efficient agentic settings where only limited source evidence can be retained. Under such constraints, source semantics become unreliable, leading to unstable source anchoring, uncertain target association, and fragile targetmarginal calibration. To address these challenges, we propose DEAG, a reliability-aware prototype learning framework for data-efficient agentic GDA. DEAG estimates class reliability from retained source support and embedding compactness, and constructs stable reusable source anchors by blending empirical prototypes with classifier directions. Guided by these anchors, DEAG performs prototype-aware soft target association and aligns confidence-weighted target centers with source semantics. A source-prior regularizer further sharpens target predictions while keeping the target marginal consistent with retained source evidence. Experiments on graph benchmarks with diverse domain shifts show that DEAG improves average adaptation performance over competitive GDA baselines under the same source-data budget.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the proposed DEAG . DEAG estimates source-class reliability using support size and embedding compactness, constructs reusable source anchors by blending source prototypes with classifier directions, softly associates target graphs with these anchors, and jointly optimizes prototype alignment and source-prior target-marginal calibration.
Methods
Node Shift
Edge Shift
Feature Shift
M0 → M1
M0 → M2
M0 → M3
M0 → M1
M0 → M2
M0 → M3
P → D
D → P
C → CM
CM → C
B → BM
BM → B
GCN
53.2 ± 4.1
49.5 ± 3.6
50.1 ± 4.5
61.5 ± 5.4
53.2 ± 4.8
47.3 ± 3.2
52.3 ± 4.1
48.7 ± 5.2
41.2 ± 3.8
45.6 ± 2.9
44.3 ± 6.2
43.8 ± 4.7
GIN
51.4 ± 5.2
47.8 ± 4.4
49.6 ± 3.8
59.8 ± 6.1
51.6 ± 5.2
46.5 ± 4.1
50.7 ± 5.3
47.2 ± 4.6
40.8 ± 4.1
44.9 ± 3.2
43.6 ± 5.8
42.1 ± 4.9
GMT
55.1 ± 3.8
51.2 ± 3.2
51.5 ± 2.9
62.4 ± 4.5
54.5 ± 3.9
48.2 ± 2.8
54.2 ± 3.7
49.6 ± 3.4
42.4 ± 3.6
46.8 ± 2.8
45.4 ± 5.1
44.7 ± 4.2
CIN
54.3 ± 4.5
50.6 ± 3.7
50.9 ± 3.4
61.9 ± 5.0
53.8 ± 4.2
47.8 ± 3.1
53.6 ± 4.2
48.9 ± 4.1
41.7 ± 3.9
45.2 ± 3.1
44.8 ± 5.4
43.9 ± 4.5
PathNN
52.8 ± 4.8
48.9 ± 4.1
50.4 ± 3.6
60.5 ± 5.6
52.4 ± 4.9
46.9 ± 3.7
51.8 ± 4.6
47.8 ± 4.3
41.1 ± 4.2
44.7 ± 3.4
43.9 ± 5.6
43.2 ± 4.8
Table 1: Graph classification results (in %) under node and edge density domain shifts on the Mutagenicity dataset, and under feature shifts (source → target). P, D, C, CM, B, and BM denote PROTEINS, DD, COX2, COX2_MD, BZR, and BZR_MD, respectively. Bold indicates the best performance.
Methods
Node Avg.
Edge Avg.
Feature Avg.
Avg. Rank
p -value
W/T/L
GCN
46.82
47.23
45.98
11.52
1.84×10−23
54/0/0
GIN
46.25
46.87
44.88
12.34
1.23×10−23
54/0/0
GMT
48.03
48.46
47.18
7.78
4.25×10−22
54/0/0
CIN
47.50
47.89
46.35
9.91
8.96×10−23
54/0/0
PathNN
47.08
47.52
45.42
10.13
4.90×10−23
54/0/0
DEAL
57.10
56.87
49.67
3.75
3.38×10−15
52/1/1
Table 2: Aggregate comparison across all reported tasks. Bold results indicate the best performance.
Figure 2: Information yield under source-data budgets and sensitivity analysis on Mutagenicity.
Method
M0 → M1
M0 → M2
M0 → M3
M1 → M0
M1 → M2
M1 → M3
M2 → M0
M2 → M1
M2 → M3
M3 → M0
M3 → M1
M3 → M2
DEAG w/o Lpa
70.8
63.4
57.1
65.4
67.5
59.8
62.3
73.1
61.2
58.6
60.1
67.8
DEAG w/o Lptr
73.4
66.1
60.3
67.3
70.2
62.5
65.0
75.8
64.1
62.1
63.4
70.6
DEAG w/o Hcond
74.9
67.5
61.6
69.8
71.8
64.1
66.9
77.4
65.7
63.4
65.0
72.3
DEAG w/o Dprior
75.3
68.2
61.2
70.7
72.3
64.6
67.8
77.8
66.2
63.1
65.5
72.7
DEAG
76.9
69.7
63.4
71.8
73.7
65.9
69.1
79.2
67.5
65.0
66.8
74.0
Table 3: The results of ablation studies on the Mutagenicity dataset. Bold results indicate the best performance.
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Datasets
Graphs
Avg. Nodes
Avg. Edges
Classes
NCI1
4,110
29.87
32.30
2
Mutagenicity
4,337
30.32
30.77
2
DD
1,178
284.32
715.66
2
PROTEINS
1,113
39.1
72.8
2
COX2
467
41.22
43.45
2
COX2_MD
303
26.28
335.12
2
Appendix
Table 4: Statistics of the experimental datasets.
Method
M0 → M1
M0 → M2
M0 → M3
M1 → M0
M1 → M2
M1 → M3
M2 → M0
M2 → M1
M2 → M3
M3 → M0
M3 → M1
M3 → M2
GCN
53.2 ± 4.1
49.5 ± 3.6
50.1 ± 4.5
46.5 ± 2.4
58.2 ± 2.1
45.7 ± 1.6
46.1 ± 1.8
65.3 ± 2.5
45.1 ± 1.9
48.6 ± 2.8
41.2 ± 6.2
43.5 ± 5.1
GIN
51.4 ± 5.2
47.8 ± 4.4
49.6 ± 3.8
45.1 ± 2.9
56.8 ± 2.5
44.3 ± 1.9
44.8 ± 2.1
63.9 ± 3.1
43.7 ± 2.2
47.1 ± 3.1
39.5 ± 5.8
41.8 ± 6.5
GMT
55.1 ± 3.8
51.2 ± 3.2
51.5 ± 2.9
47.8 ± 2.1
59.4 ± 1.8
46.8 ± 1.4
47.3 ± 1.5
66.8 ± 2.2
46.3 ± 1.6
49.5 ± 2.4
42.6 ± 5.5
44.7 ± 4.8
CIN
54.3 ± 4.5
50.6 ± 3.7
50.9 ± 3.4
47.2 ± 2.3
58.9 ± 2.0
46.2 ± 1.5
46.7 ± 1.7
66.1 ± 2.4
45.8 ± 1.8
48.9 ± 2.9
41.9 ± 6.0
43.9 ± 5.6
PathNN
52.8 ± 4.8
48.9 ± 4.1
50.4 ± 3.6
45.8 ± 2.7
57.5 ± 2.4
45.1 ± 1.8
45.4 ± 2.0
64.5 ± 2.8
44.6 ± 2.1
47.8 ± 3.0
40.7 ± 5.9
42.6 ± 6.1
DEAL
72.1 ± 2.1
64.8 ± 2.4
56.1 ± 1.2
67.8 ± 2.2
68.0 ± 3.1
58.5 ± 2.8
69.1 ± 2.9
72.4 ± 1.3
61.2 ± 2.2
59.4 ± 3.9
52.5 ± 2.3
65.4 ± 4.1
Appendix
Table 5: The classification results (in %) on the Mutagenicity dataset under node density domain shift (source → target). M0, M1, M2, and M3 denote the sub-datasets partitioned with node density. Bold results indicate the best performance.
Method
M0 → M1
M0 → M2
M0 → M3
M1 → M0
M1 → M2
M1 → M3
M2 → M0
M2 → M1
M2 → M3
M3 → M0
M3 → M1
M3 → M2
GCN
61.5 ± 5.4
53.2 ± 4.8
47.3 ± 3.2
50.1 ± 2.5
55.4 ± 2.8
45.3 ± 1.9
50.5 ± 2.2
64.2 ± 3.5
45.0 ± 1.7
47.9 ± 2.5
33.8 ± 2.7
42.1 ± 4.6
GIN
59.8 ± 6.1
51.6 ± 5.2
46.5 ± 4.1
48.7 ± 3.1
54.1 ± 3.4
44.2 ± 2.1
49.3 ± 2.5
62.8 ± 4.1
43.8 ± 2.0
46.2 ± 3.3
32.6 ± 3.5
41.5 ± 5.2
GMT
62.4 ± 4.5
54.5 ± 3.9
48.2 ± 2.8
51.5 ± 2.2
56.6 ± 2.4
46.4 ± 1.5
51.8 ± 1.8
65.5 ± 3.0
46.1 ± 1.4
48.7 ± 2.1
34.5 ± 2.9
43.8 ± 3.7
CIN
61.9 ± 5.0
53.8 ± 4.2
47.8 ± 3.1
50.8 ± 2.4
55.9 ± 2.7
45.8 ± 1.7
51.1 ± 2.1
64.8 ± 3.3
45.5 ± 1.6
48.1 ± 2.4
34.1 ± 3.1
42.7 ± 4.1
PathNN
60.5 ± 5.6
52.4 ± 4.9
46.9 ± 3.7
49.3 ± 2.8
54.8 ± 3.1
44.9 ± 2.0
49.8 ± 2.4
63.5 ± 3.8
44.5 ± 1.9
47.3 ± 2.8
33.2 ± 3.2
41.9 ± 4.8
DEAL
72.8 ± 0.7
62.5 ± 2.1
54.2 ± 1.4
67.5 ± 2.8
64.2 ± 4.9
58.6 ± 2.1
68.9 ± 1.8
66.4 ± 3.5
60.1 ± 4.1
57.8 ± 1.7
55.7 ± 6.2
66.1 ± 2.5
Appendix
Table 6: The classification results (in %) on the Mutagenicity dataset under edge density domain shift (source → target). M0, M1, M2, and M3 denote the sub-datasets partitioned with edge density. Bold results indicate the best performance.
Method
N0 → N1
N0 → N2
N0 → N3
N1 → N0
N1 → N2
N1 → N3
N2 → N0
N2 → N1
N2 → N3
N3 → N0
N3 → N1
N3 → N2
GCN
49.5 ± 2.1
42.2 ± 1.8
32.1 ± 2.4
62.1 ± 15.5
41.2 ± 1.8
38.5 ± 11.2
25.5 ± 1.4
47.5 ± 1.5
61.2 ± 1.1
26.5 ± 1.5
48.3 ± 1.7
56.1 ± 2.2
GIN
50.1 ± 1.9
42.4 ± 2.0
31.8 ± 1.9
62.6 ± 16.1
41.6 ± 2.1
38.9 ± 11.8
25.8 ± 1.6
47.9 ± 1.7
61.6 ± 1.3
26.8 ± 1.3
48.8 ± 2.1
55.8 ± 2.4
GMT
51.2 ± 2.4
43.1 ± 2.5
33.0 ± 2.8
63.8 ± 14.8
42.5 ± 1.5
39.8 ± 10.5
26.4 ± 1.2
48.8 ± 1.3
62.5 ± 0.9
27.0 ± 1.6
49.1 ± 1.8
56.5 ± 1.9
CIN
50.6 ± 2.1
42.8 ± 2.3
32.5 ± 2.2
63.2 ± 15.3
41.9 ± 1.7
39.2 ± 11.0
26.1 ± 1.3
48.2 ± 1.4
61.9 ± 1.0
26.9 ± 1.8
49.0 ± 2.0
56.2 ± 2.1
PathNN
51.5 ± 1.8
43.5 ± 1.9
33.2 ± 2.0
63.5 ± 15.0
42.2 ± 1.9
39.5 ± 10.8
26.3 ± 1.5
48.5 ± 1.6
62.2 ± 1.2
27.1 ± 1.2
49.4 ± 1.5
56.8 ± 1.7
DEAL
53.2 ± 1.8
46.1 ± 3.6
38.8 ± 6.2
71.1 ± 1.5
54.9 ± 3.5
48.4 ± 2.4
40.2 ± 12.5
50.3 ± 2.8
66.5 ± 0.9
27.2 ± 1.1
49.3 ± 1.2
57.2 ± 1.8
Appendix
Table 7: The classification results (in %) on the NCI1 dataset under node density domain shift (source → target). N0, N1, N2, and N3 denote the sub-datasets partitioned with node density. Bold results indicate the best performance.
Method
N0 → N1
N0 → N2
N0 → N3
N1 → N0
N1 → N2
N1 → N3
N2 → N0
N2 → N1
N2 → N3
N3 → N0
N3 → N1
N3 → N2
GCN
47.8 ± 1.9
45.3 ± 2.1
30.8 ± 1.6
43.1 ± 15.2
48.2 ± 2.4
51.5 ± 15.2
34.2 ± 16.5
49.5 ± 1.5
58.7 ± 8.5
26.8 ± 1.4
49.5 ± 1.8
51.9 ± 2.0
GIN
48.2 ± 1.7
46.1 ± 1.5
31.2 ± 2.1
43.5 ± 16.1
48.7 ± 2.7
52.1 ± 16.1
34.8 ± 17.1
50.1 ± 1.7
59.3 ± 9.1
27.1 ± 1.8
50.2 ± 2.2
52.4 ± 1.6
GMT
49.9 ± 2.2
46.5 ± 2.4
31.5 ± 1.9
44.8 ± 14.8
49.5 ± 2.1
53.0 ± 14.8
35.6 ± 15.8
51.0 ± 1.3
60.5 ± 7.8
27.2 ± 1.5
50.8 ± 1.7
52.8 ± 2.1
CIN
48.5 ± 1.8
46.2 ± 2.0
31.3 ± 1.7
44.2 ± 15.3
48.9 ± 2.3
52.4 ± 15.3
35.1 ± 16.2
50.4 ± 1.4
59.9 ± 8.2
27.0 ± 1.7
50.5 ± 1.6
52.6 ± 1.9
PathNN
49.1 ± 1.5
46.8 ± 1.8
31.7 ± 1.4
44.6 ± 15.0
49.2 ± 2.5
52.8 ± 15.0
35.4 ± 16.0
50.7 ± 1.6
60.2 ± 8.0
27.3 ± 1.3
50.6 ± 1.7
53.0 ± 1.5
DEAL
52.1 ± 2.7
49.2 ± 1.8
36.7 ± 6.4
70.8 ± 2.5
53.8 ± 2.1
54.7 ± 7.2
42.8 ± 13.5
54.1 ± 3.4
64.1 ± 4.8
27.5 ± 1.2
51.2 ± 1.1
53.1 ± 1.4
Appendix
Table 8: The classification results (in %) on the NCI1 dataset under edge density domain shift (source → target). N0, N1, N2, and N3 denote the sub-datasets partitioned with edge density. Bold results indicate the best performance.
Graph domain adaptation (GDA) transfers knowledge from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph under shifts in both node attributes and graph structure. Existing methods primarily adapt graph representations through propagation redesign, distribution alignment, or source-to-target transition modeling, but still rely on a single graph-propagating path for target prediction. This leaves open whether an adapted graph representation exhausts the predictive evidence available in the target domain, since the graph-aware expert and graph-free local expert may exhibit different failure modes under topological shifts. To address this limitation, we propose EviGDA, an Evidence-Augmented Graph Domain Adaptation framework that complements graph representation adaptation with a graph-free local expert. The graph-aware expert performs message passing and entropy-aware marginal alignment, while the graph-free local expert learns solely from source node features and labels without graph propagation or target alignment. The two experts are optimized independently and combined only at inference through a task-level constant probability mixture, preserving complementary evidence without joint training, learned routing, or target pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on ten datasets and 16 transfer tasks show that EviGDA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Complementary prediction paths add value beyond graph representation alignment.
Ziqian Liu, Yongxue Xu, Enze Zhang +3
Sun Yat-sen University, China · University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA · Jiangsu University, China +2
Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) transfers predictive knowledge from labeled source graphs to unlabeled target graphs under distribution shift. Existing methods align representations or regularize graph structures, but do not explicitly model how class-discriminative knowledge learned at different source neighborhood ranges should be routed across target ranges. We call the neighborhood range encoded by a graph representation its propagation resolution and define semantic resolution shift as a cross-domain change in the propagation resolutions at which class-discriminative evidence is strongest. Such shifts can make fixed same-resolution pairing suboptimal and increase the risk of negative transfer. To address this issue, we propose Cross-Resolution Semantic Learning (CReSL), a GDA method that learns soft sourceto-target resolution correspondence from cross-domain class structure. First, CReSL constructs a multi-resolution representation bank using a shared Graph Neural Network and learnable resolution embeddings, with a resolution-indexed expert for each source resolution. Second, CReSL introduces Cross-Resolution Prototype Transport, which constructs class-resolution prototypes from source labels and soft target posteriors and converts cross-domain prototype discrepancies into expert-specific routing over target resolutions. Third, CReSL introduces Cross-Resolution Target Grafting, which constructs posterior-weighted target-to-source prototype displacements and enforces correspondence-weighted prediction consistency for instance-level adaptation under class uncertainty. Extensive experiments on graph benchmarks under diverse domain shifts show that CReSL outperforms strong representative baselines across most settings.
Yingxu Wang, Haoze Huang, Zhongkai Zheng +1
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Fuzhou University · Sun Yat-sen University +1
Source-free graph domain adaptation (SF-GDA) aims to adapt source-trained graph models to unlabeled target graphs when source graphs are no longer accessible. A central obstacle is pseudo-label reliability: under feature and topological shifts, source-induced predictions may become confidently wrong, and indiscriminate self-training can amplify systematic errors through graph message passing. This paper studies SF-GDA from a selective pseudo-labeling perspective. Instead of assuming globally bounded pseudo-label noise over the entire target domain, we identify a confidence-consistent safe subspace on which pseudo-label noise can be controlled under restricted posterior discrepancy, and derive a target-risk decomposition that separates safe-subspace fitting error, selected-label noise, and uncertain-set risk. Guided by this analysis, we propose SafeSubspace Pseudo-Label Refinement (S2PLR), a source-free graph adaptation framework that applies hard pseudo-label supervision only to target graphs supported by both semantic and structural evidence. Specifically, S2PLR estimates semantic reliability using source-committee confidence and disagreement, learns a targetintrinsic structural representation via graph contrastive learning, verifies pseudo-labels through neighborhood consistency, and exploits the remaining uncertain samples with noise-tolerant soft regularization rather than unreliable hard labels. Experiments on image and real-world graph benchmarks under different domain shifts demonstrate that S2PLR achieves robust and competitive performance across diverse source-free transfer settings.
Yingxu Wang, Xinwang Liu, Siyang Gao +1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong · College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China · Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong +1