DGTF: Cross-Domain Decentralized Graph Learning with Topology-Aware Knowledge Fusion

Abstract

Cross-Domain Decentralized Graph Learning (CD-DGL) is a promising paradigm that enables efficient, privacy-preserving collaboration among multiple parties to unlock the value of cross-domain graph data. However, it faces two fundamental challenges. First, inconsistent label spaces across domains drive local models to learn domain-specific biases, which means domain-invariant topological knowledge extraction beyond label constraints is difficult. Second, existing domain topology shift and heterogeneous model architectures make direct model aggregation infeasible. To address these issues, we first use Extended Persistent Homology (EPH) to reveal and quantify the problem of domain topology shift induced by the cross-domain setting. Building on this insight, we present Decentralized Graph Learning with Topology-Aware Knowledge Fusion (DGTF), a novel framework designed to facilitate positive topological knowledge transfer in CD-DGL. Our framework achieves this by integrating two core strategies: first, a contrastive learning-based approach to extract task-agnostic topological knowledge, and second, a topology-aware, model-independent knowledge fusion method to effectively integrate this topological information. Extensive experiments conducted under various cross-domain and model-heterogeneous settings validate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed framework.