Towards Fair Graph Prompting: A Dual-Prompt Mechanism for Mitigating Attribute and Structural Bias (arxiv.org)
arXiv:2510.23469v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Self-supervised pre-training on unlabeled graph data has become a common paradigm for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, an objective gap often remains between pre-training objectives and downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, graph prompting methods adapt frozen pre-trained GNNs to specific downstream tasks through learnable prompts. Despite its effectiveness, most existing graph prompting methods primarily focus on improving model performance and largely overlook fairness concerns. As downstream graph data inherently contains biases in both node attributes and graph structures, pre-trained GNNs may produce representations that differ across demographic subgroups. To address this limitation, we propose Adaptive Dual Prompting (ADPrompt), a fairness-aware graph prompting framework for adapting pre-trained GNNs. ADPrompt incorporates two complementary components: Adaptive Feature Rectification, which learns personalized attribute prompts to suppress sensitive information at the input level, and Adaptive Message Calibration, which introduces layer-wise structure prompts to dynamically regulate information propagation from neighboring nodes. By jointly optimizing these two modules, ADPrompt adapts the pre-trained GNN while mitigating both attribute-level and structural bias. Experiments on four benchmark datasets with multiple pre-training strategies demonstrate that ADPrompt consistently outperforms seven competitive baselines in node classification tasks.
Abstract: Self-supervised pre-training on unlabeled graph data has become a common paradigm for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, an objective gap often remains between pre-training objectives and downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, graph prompting methods adapt frozen pre-trained GNNs to specific downstream tasks through learnable prompts. Despite its effectiveness, most existing graph prompting methods primarily focus on improving model performance and largely overlook fairness concerns. As downstream graph data inherently contains biases in both node attributes and graph structures, pre-trained GNNs may produce representations that differ across demographic subgroups. To address this limitation, we propose Adaptive Dual Prompting (ADPrompt), a fairness-aware graph prompting framework for adapting pre-trained GNNs. ADPrompt incorporates two complementary components: Adaptive Feature Rectification, which learns personalized attribute prompts to suppress sensitive information at the input level, and Adaptive Message Calibration, which introduces layer-wise structure prompts to dynamically regulate information propagation from neighboring nodes. By jointly optimizing these two modules, ADPrompt adapts the pre-trained GNN while mitigating both attribute-level and structural bias. Experiments on four benchmark datasets with multiple pre-training strategies demonstrate that ADPrompt consistently outperforms seven competitive baselines in node classification tasks.
Comments