MUG: Meta-path-aware Universal Heterogeneous Graph Pre-Training

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shan, Lianze, Zhao, Jitao, He, Dongxiao, Huang, Yongqi, Feng, Zhiyong, Zhang, Weixiong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911469978779648
author Shan, Lianze
Zhao, Jitao
He, Dongxiao
Huang, Yongqi
Feng, Zhiyong
Zhang, Weixiong
author_facet Shan, Lianze
Zhao, Jitao
He, Dongxiao
Huang, Yongqi
Feng, Zhiyong
Zhang, Weixiong
contents Universal graph pre-training has emerged as a key paradigm in graph representation learning, offering a promising way to train encoders to learn transferable representations from unlabeled graphs and to effectively generalize across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, recent explorations in universal graph pre-training primarily focus on homogeneous graphs and it remains unexplored for heterogeneous graphs, which exhibit greater structural and semantic complexity. This heterogeneity makes it highly challenging to train a universal encoder for diverse heterogeneous graphs: (i) the diverse types with dataset-specific semantics hinder the construction of a unified representation space; (ii) the number and semantics of meta-paths vary across datasets, making encoding and aggregation patterns learned from one dataset difficult to apply to others. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Meta-path-aware Universal heterogeneous Graph pre-training (MUG) approach. Specifically, for challenge (i), MUG introduces a input unification module that integrates information from multiple node and relation types within each heterogeneous graph into a unified representation.This representation is then projected into a shared space by a dimension-aware encoder, enabling alignment across graphs with diverse schemas.Furthermore, for challenge (ii), MUG trains a shared encoder to capture consistent structural patterns across diverse meta-path views rather than relying on dataset-specific aggregation strategies, while a global objective encourages discriminability and reduces dataset-specific biases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MUG on some real datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_22645
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MUG: Meta-path-aware Universal Heterogeneous Graph Pre-Training
Shan, Lianze
Zhao, Jitao
He, Dongxiao
Huang, Yongqi
Feng, Zhiyong
Zhang, Weixiong
Machine Learning
Universal graph pre-training has emerged as a key paradigm in graph representation learning, offering a promising way to train encoders to learn transferable representations from unlabeled graphs and to effectively generalize across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, recent explorations in universal graph pre-training primarily focus on homogeneous graphs and it remains unexplored for heterogeneous graphs, which exhibit greater structural and semantic complexity. This heterogeneity makes it highly challenging to train a universal encoder for diverse heterogeneous graphs: (i) the diverse types with dataset-specific semantics hinder the construction of a unified representation space; (ii) the number and semantics of meta-paths vary across datasets, making encoding and aggregation patterns learned from one dataset difficult to apply to others. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Meta-path-aware Universal heterogeneous Graph pre-training (MUG) approach. Specifically, for challenge (i), MUG introduces a input unification module that integrates information from multiple node and relation types within each heterogeneous graph into a unified representation.This representation is then projected into a shared space by a dimension-aware encoder, enabling alignment across graphs with diverse schemas.Furthermore, for challenge (ii), MUG trains a shared encoder to capture consistent structural patterns across diverse meta-path views rather than relying on dataset-specific aggregation strategies, while a global objective encourages discriminability and reduces dataset-specific biases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MUG on some real datasets.
title MUG: Meta-path-aware Universal Heterogeneous Graph Pre-Training
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22645