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Main Authors: Cheng, Ziyang, Li, Zhixun, Li, Yuhan, Song, Yixin, Zhao, Kangyi, Cheng, Dawei, Li, Jia, Cheng, Hong, Yu, Jeffrey Xu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18697
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author Cheng, Ziyang
Li, Zhixun
Li, Yuhan
Song, Yixin
Zhao, Kangyi
Cheng, Dawei
Li, Jia
Cheng, Hong
Yu, Jeffrey Xu
author_facet Cheng, Ziyang
Li, Zhixun
Li, Yuhan
Song, Yixin
Zhao, Kangyi
Cheng, Dawei
Li, Jia
Cheng, Hong
Yu, Jeffrey Xu
contents Nowadays, real-world data, including graph-structure data, often arrives in a streaming manner, which means that learning systems need to continuously acquire new knowledge without forgetting previously learned information. Although substantial existing works attempt to address catastrophic forgetting in graph machine learning, they are all based on training from scratch with streaming data. With the rise of pretrained models, an increasing number of studies have leveraged their strong generalization ability for continual learning. Therefore, in this work, we attempt to answer whether large language models (LLMs) can mitigate catastrophic forgetting in Graph Continual Learning (GCL). We first point out that current experimental setups for GCL have significant flaws, as the evaluation stage may lead to task ID leakage. Then, we evaluate the performance of LLMs in more realistic scenarios and find that even minor modifications can lead to outstanding results. Finally, based on extensive experiments, we propose a simple-yet-effective method, Simple Graph Continual Learning (SimGCL), that surpasses the previous state-of-the-art GNN-based baseline by around 20% under the rehearsal-free constraint. To facilitate reproducibility, we have developed an easy-to-use benchmark LLM4GCL for training and evaluating existing GCL methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/ZhixunLEE/LLM4GCL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18697
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can LLMs Alleviate Catastrophic Forgetting in Graph Continual Learning? A Systematic Study
Cheng, Ziyang
Li, Zhixun
Li, Yuhan
Song, Yixin
Zhao, Kangyi
Cheng, Dawei
Li, Jia
Cheng, Hong
Yu, Jeffrey Xu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Nowadays, real-world data, including graph-structure data, often arrives in a streaming manner, which means that learning systems need to continuously acquire new knowledge without forgetting previously learned information. Although substantial existing works attempt to address catastrophic forgetting in graph machine learning, they are all based on training from scratch with streaming data. With the rise of pretrained models, an increasing number of studies have leveraged their strong generalization ability for continual learning. Therefore, in this work, we attempt to answer whether large language models (LLMs) can mitigate catastrophic forgetting in Graph Continual Learning (GCL). We first point out that current experimental setups for GCL have significant flaws, as the evaluation stage may lead to task ID leakage. Then, we evaluate the performance of LLMs in more realistic scenarios and find that even minor modifications can lead to outstanding results. Finally, based on extensive experiments, we propose a simple-yet-effective method, Simple Graph Continual Learning (SimGCL), that surpasses the previous state-of-the-art GNN-based baseline by around 20% under the rehearsal-free constraint. To facilitate reproducibility, we have developed an easy-to-use benchmark LLM4GCL for training and evaluating existing GCL methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/ZhixunLEE/LLM4GCL.
title Can LLMs Alleviate Catastrophic Forgetting in Graph Continual Learning? A Systematic Study
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18697