Federated learning is a new learning paradigm that decouples data collection and model training via multi-party computation and model aggregation. As a flexible learning setting, federated learning has the potential to integrate with other learning frameworks. We conduct a focused survey of federated learning in conjunction with other learning algorithms. Specifically, we explore various learning algorithms to improve the vanilla federated averaging algorithm and review model fusion methods such as adaptive aggregation, regularization, clustered methods, and Bayesian methods. Following the emerging trends, we also discuss federated learning in the intersection with other learning paradigms, termed federated X learning, where X includes multitask learning, meta-learning, transfer learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. In addition to reviewing state-of-the-art studies, this paper also identifies key challenges and applications in this field, while also highlighting promising future directions.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown their superiority in modeling graph data. Owing to the advantages of federated learning, federated graph learning (FGL) enables clients to train strong GNN models in a distributed manner without sharing their private data. A core challenge in federated systems is the non-IID problem, which also widely exists in real-world graph data. For example, local data of clients may come from diverse datasets or even domains, e.g., social networks and molecules, increasing the difficulty for FGL methods to capture commonly shared knowledge and learn a generalized encoder. From real-world graph datasets, we observe that some structural properties are shared by various domains, presenting great potential for sharing structural knowledge in FGL. Inspired by this, we propose FedStar, an FGL framework that extracts and shares the common underlying structure information for inter-graph federated learning tasks. To explicitly extract the structure information rather than encoding them along with the node features, we define structure embeddings and encode them with an independent structure encoder. Then, the structure encoder is shared across clients while the feature-based knowledge is learned in a personalized way, making FedStar capable of capturing more structure-based domain-invariant information and avoiding feature misalignment issues. We perform extensive experiments over both cross-dataset and cross-domain non-IID FGL settings, demonstrating the superiority of FedStar.

Unsupervised graph representation learning (UGRL) has drawn increasing research attention and achieved promising results in several graph analytic tasks. Relying on the homophily assumption, existing UGRL methods tend to smooth the learned node representations along all edges, ignoring the existence of heterophilic edges that connect nodes with distinct attributes. As a result, current methods are hard to generalize to heterophilic graphs where dissimilar nodes are widely connected, and also vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose a novel unsupervised Graph Representation learning method with Edge hEterophily discriminaTing (GREET) which learns representations by discriminating and leveraging homophilic edges and heterophilic edges. To distinguish two types of edges, we build an edge discriminator that infers edge homophily/heterophily from feature and structure information. We train the edge discriminator in an unsupervised way through minimizing the crafted pivot-anchored ranking loss, with randomly sampled node pairs acting as pivots. Node representations are learned through contrasting the dual-channel encodings obtained from the discriminated homophilic and heterophilic edges. With an effective interplaying scheme, edge discriminating and representation learning can mutually boost each other during the training phase. We conducted extensive experiments on 14 benchmark datasets and multiple learning scenarios to demonstrate the superiority of GREET.

Most existing deep learning models are trained based on the closed-world assumption, where the test data is assumed to be drawn i.i.d. from the same distribution as the training data, known as in-distribution (ID). However, when models are deployed in an open-world scenario, test samples can be out-of-distribution (OOD) and therefore should be handled with caution. To detect such OOD samples drawn from unknown distribution, OOD detection has received increasing attention lately. However, current endeavors mostly focus on grid-structured data and its application for graph-structured data remains under-explored. Considering the fact that data labeling on graphs is commonly time-expensive and labor-intensive, in this work we study the problem of unsupervised graph OOD detection, aiming at detecting OOD graphs solely based on unlabeled ID data. To achieve this goal, we develop a new graph contrastive learning framework GOOD-D for detecting OOD graphs without using any ground-truth labels. By performing hierarchical contrastive learning on the augmented graphs generated by our perturbation-free graph data augmentation method, GOOD-D is able to capture the latent ID patterns and accurately detect OOD graphs based on the semantic inconsistency in different granularities (i.e., node-level, graph-level, and group-level). As a pioneering work in unsupervised graph-level OOD detection, we build a comprehensive benchmark to compare our proposed approach with different state-of-the-art methods. The experiment results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over different methods on various datasets.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have exhibited impressive performance in many graph learning tasks. Nevertheless, the performance of GNNs can deteriorate when the input graph data suffer from weak information, i.e., incomplete structure, incomplete features, and insufficient labels. Most prior studies, which attempt to learn from the graph data with a specific type of weak information, are far from effective in dealing with the scenario where diverse data deficiencies exist and mutually affect each other. To fill the gap, in this paper, we aim to develop an effective and principled approach to the problem of graph learning with weak information (GLWI). Based on the findings from our empirical analysis, we derive two design focal points for solving the problem of GLWI, i.e., enabling long-range propagation in GNNs and allowing information propagation to those stray nodes isolated from the largest connected component. Accordingly, we propose D²PT, a dual-channel GNN framework that performs long-range information propagation not only on the input graph with incomplete structure, but also on a global graph that encodes global semantic similarities. We further develop a prototype contrastive alignment algorithm that aligns the class-level prototypes learned from two channels, such that the two different information propagation processes can mutually benefit from each other and the finally learned model can well handle the GLWI problem. Extensive experiments on eight real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods in various GLWI scenarios.