Test-Time Adaptation of Graph Neural Networks under Distribution Shifts

WU Tao; ZHOU Yuanqing; XIAN Xingping; CUI Canyixing; LIU Yichen; QIAO Shaojie; NIU Weina

doi:10.12263/DZXB.20251206

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Test-Time Adaptation of Graph Neural Networks under Distribution Shifts

PAPERS | 更新时间：2026-07-30

- Test-Time Adaptation of Graph Neural Networks under Distribution Shifts
- ACTA ELECTRONICA SINICA Vol. 54, Issue 4, Pages: 1732-1747(2026)
- 作者机构：
  
  1.重庆邮电大学网络空间安全与信息法学院，重庆 400065
  2.成都信息工程大学软件工程学院，四川成都 610225
  3.电子科技大学网络空间安全学院，四川成都 611731
- 作者简介：
- 基金信息：
  
  National Natural Science Foundation of China(62376047);Chongqing Natural Science Foundation Innovation and Development Joint Fund Key Project(CSTB2023NSCQ-LZX0003);The Key Project of Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Education Commission(KJZD-K202300603;KJZD-K202500604)
- DOI：10.12263/DZXB.20251206
  CLC： TP391;
- Received：26 February 2026，
  
  Accepted：08 April 2026，
  
  Online First：25 May 2026，
  
  Published：25 April 2026
- 稿件说明：
移动端阅览
吴涛, 周圆庆, 先兴平, 等. 分布偏移场景下图神经网络测试时自适应方法[J]. 电子学报, 2026, 54(04): 1732-1747.

WU Tao, ZHOU Yuanqing, XIAN Xingping, et al. Test-Time Adaptation of Graph Neural Networks under Distribution Shifts[J]. Acta Electronica Sinica, 2026, 54(04): 1732-1747.
吴涛, 周圆庆, 先兴平, 等. 分布偏移场景下图神经网络测试时自适应方法[J]. 电子学报, 2026, 54(04): 1732-1747. DOI：10.12263/DZXB.20251206

WU Tao, ZHOU Yuanqing, XIAN Xingping, et al. Test-Time Adaptation of Graph Neural Networks under Distribution Shifts[J]. Acta Electronica Sinica, 2026, 54(04): 1732-1747. DOI：10.12263/DZXB.20251206

摘要

图神经网络（Graph Neural Networks，GNNs）凭借其强大的表征能力，在多种图学习任务中表现出色。然而，当训练集与测试集之间的数据分布发生偏移时，GNNs的预测性能会显著下降。现有研究普遍将分布偏移视为单一的整体扰动，缺乏对协变量偏移与概念偏移的区分建模，这种粗粒度的处理难以刻画两类偏移对模型性能的差异化影响，进而制约了传统的图神经网络泛化方法在分布偏移场景下的针对性与有效性。针对此问题，本工作从协变量偏移和概念偏移的特性出发，提出一种基于原型引导的测试时自适应方法ProGTA（Prototype-Guided Test-time Adaptation）。该方法突破了传统静态域适应的局限，主要由原型图对比学习模块和多层次对齐模块构成，能够在模型推理之前进行自适应更新。具体而言，原型图对比学习模块在编码器后引入可学习的类别原型层，利用源域先验指导目标域节点的软分配，以建模图数据的类别语义结构，进而构造出具备更高语义可靠性的同质性增强视图。同时，该模块结合原型对比损失和原型聚类损失联合优化节点表征与类别原型，将局部视图一致性提升为类别语义一致性，为后续类别原型对齐提供可靠的语义锚点。多层次对齐模块则在测试时训练阶段通过对齐源域与目标域嵌入表征的一阶和二阶统计量来缓解协变量偏移造成的特征分布变化，同时通过对齐源域与目标域的类别原型分布来缓解概念偏移造成的类别语义变化。为验证所提方法的有效性，本工作在涵盖人工偏移、时间演化及跨域偏移的多个图分布偏移基准数据集上进行了详尽的实验评估。实验结果表明，ProGTA在分布外泛化性能上显著优于Tent、EERM和GTrans等代表性方法。进一步地，本研究从域适应视角分析了对抗攻击和概念偏移在破坏模型决策边界方面的一致性，将对抗攻击问题转化为分布偏移的一种特例，证实了该方法可同时提升模型的分布外泛化性与对抗鲁棒性。

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved outstanding performance in various graph learning tasks owing to their powerful representation capabilities. However

the predictive performance of GNNs degrades significantly when data distribution shifts occur between the training and test sets. Existing studies generally treat distribution shift as a single holistic perturbation and lack differentiated modeling of covariate shift and concept shift. Such coarse-grained processing fails to characterize the distinct impacts of these two types of shifts on model performance

thereby restricting the pertinence and effectiveness of traditional GNN generalization methods in distribution shift scenarios. To address this issue

starting from the characteristics of covariate shift and concept shift

this work proposes a prototype-guided test-time adaptation method named ProGTA (Prototype-Guided Test-time Adaptation). This method breaks through the limitations of traditional static domain adaptation

mainly consisting of a prototype graph contrastive learning module and a multi-level alignment module

which enables adaptive updating prior to model inference. Specifically

the prototype graph contrastive learning module introduces a learnable class prototype layer after the encoder

leverages source domain priors to guide the soft assignment of target domain nodes

models the class semantic structure of graph data

and further constructs homogeneity-enhanced views with higher semantic reliability. Meanwhile

this module jointly optimizes node representations and class prototypes by combining prototype contrastive loss and prototype clustering loss

elevating local view consistency to class semantic consistency and providing reliable semantic anchors for subsequent class prototype alignment. The multi-level alignment module mitigates feature distribution variations caused by covariate shift by aligning the first-order and second-order statistics of embedding representations between the source and target domains during the test-time training phase

and addresses class semantic variations induced by concept shift by aligning the class prototype distributions of the source and target domains. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method

this work conducts comprehensive experimental evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets for graph distribution shift

covering synthetic shift

temporal evolution

and cross-domain shift scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ProGTA significantly outperforms representative methods such as Tent

EERM

and GTrans in terms of out-of-distribution generalization performance. Furthermore

this study analyzes the consistency of adversarial attacks and concept shift in disrupting the model’s decision boundaries from the domain adaptation perspective

formulates the adversarial attack problem as a special case of out-of-distribution shift

and confirms that the proposed method can simultaneously improve the model’s out-of-distribution generalization and adversarial robustness.

关键词

Keywords

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