SGPT: Few-Shot Prompt Tuning for Signed Graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces SGPT, a novel prompt tuning framework that adapts pre-trained unsigned GNNs to signed graph tasks with limited labels, significantly improving performance across multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

SGPT presents a new graph prompting approach using graph and task templates to effectively transfer knowledge from unsigned to signed graphs in few-shot scenarios.

Findings

SGPT outperforms state-of-the-art methods on seven signed graph datasets.

The graph template based on balance theory effectively mitigates structural mismatches.

Task reformulation into link prediction aligns objectives with pre-training.

Abstract

Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) are effective in learning expressive representations for signed graphs but typically require substantial task-specific labels, limiting their applicability in label-scarce industrial scenarios. In contrast, unsigned graph structures are abundant and can be readily leveraged to pre-train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), offering a promising solution to reduce supervision requirements in downstream signed graph tasks. However, transferring knowledge from unsigned to signed graphs is non-trivial due to the fundamental discrepancies in graph types and task objectives between pre-training and downstream phases. To address this challenge, we propose Signed Graph Prompt Tuning (SGPT), a novel graph prompting framework that adapts pre-trained unsigned GNNs to few-shot signed graph tasks. We first design a graph template based on balance theory to disentangle mixed node relationships introduced by negative links, mitigating the structural mismatches between unsigned and signed graphs. We further introduce a task template that reformulates downstream signed tasks into a unified link prediction objective, aligning their optimization goals with the pre-training task. Furthermore, we develop feature prompts that align downstream semantic spaces with the feature spaces learned during pre-training, and semantic prompts to integrate link sign semantics in a task-aware manner. We conduct extensive experiments on seven benchmark signed graph datasets, demonstrating that SGPT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, establishing a powerful and generalizable solution for few-shot signed graph learning.