# Modeling Inter-Intra Heterogeneity for Graph Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Personalized Federated Learning with Moreau Envelopes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08848/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning with Personalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00818/) (2019)
- [Clustered Federated Learning: Model-Agnostic Distributed Multi-Task Optimization under Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01991/) (2019)
- [A critical look at the evaluation of GNNs under heterophily: Are we really making progress?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11640/) (2023)
- [Advances in Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05597/) (2017)
- [Subgraph Federated Learning with Missing Neighbor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13430/) (2021)
- [Federated Graph Classification over Non-IID Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13423/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning with Partial Model Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03809/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled and Interpretable Representations from Sequential Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07902/) (2017)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Graphs via Structural Knowledge Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13009/) (2022)
- [Graph Attention Multi-Layer Perceptron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04355/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning via Posterior Averaging: A New Perspective and Practical Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05273/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning via Variational Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07977/) (2022)
- [Personalized Subgraph Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10206/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Generative Learning Utilizing Jensen-Shannon-Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08242/) (2020)
- [FedGTA: Topology-aware Averaging for Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11755/) (2024)
- [A Bayesian Federated Learning Framework with Online Laplace Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01936/) (2021)
- [AdaFGL: A New Paradigm for Federated Node Classification with Topology Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11750/) (2024)
- [FedGS: Federated Graph-based Sampling with Arbitrary Client Availability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13975/) (2022)
- [FedGT: Federated Node Classification with Scalable Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15203/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [MM-OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22416/) (2026)
- [A Comprehensive Data-centric Overview of Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16541/) (2025)
- [Homophily Heterogeneity Matters in Graph Federated Learning: A Spectrum Sharing and Complementing Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13732/) (2025)
- [PRISM: Topology-Aware Cross-Modal Imputation for Modality-Deficient Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09301/) (2026)
- [Federated CLIP for Resource-Efficient Heterogeneous Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07929/) (2025)
- [Heterogeneity-Aware Knowledge Sharing for Graph Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21589/) (2026)
- [Towards Effective Federated Multimodal Graph Learning via Navigating Multifaceted Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00623/) (2026)
- [SDFed: Bridging Local Global Discrepancy via Subspace Refinement and Divergence Control in Federated Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08590/) (2026)
- [Graph Federated Unlearning for Privacy Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02297/) (2026)
- [Beyond Rigid Alignment: Graph Federated Learning via Dual Manifold Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06260/) (2026)
- [FedOGL: Combating Catastrophic Forgetting in Federated Open-World Multimodal Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27665/) (2026)
- [Towards Adaptive Federated Graph Clustering: A Global Community-aware Contrastive Learning-based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26063/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Heterogeneity is a fundamental and challenging issue in federated learning, especially for the graph data due to the complex relationships among the graph nodes. To deal with the heterogeneity, lots of existing methods perform the weighted federation based on their calculated similarities between pairwise clients (i.e., subgraphs). However, their inter-subgraph similarities estimated with the outputs of local models are less reliable, because the final outputs of local models may not comprehensively represent the real distribution of subgraph data. In addition, they ignore the critical intra-heterogeneity which usually exists within each subgraph itself. To address these issues, we propose a novel Federated learning method by integrally modeling the Inter-Intra Heterogeneity (FedIIH). For the inter-subgraph relationship, we propose a novel hierarchical variational model to infer the whole distribution of subgraph data in a multi-level form, so that we can accurately characterize the inter-subgraph similarities with the global perspective. For the intra-heterogeneity, we disentangle the subgraph into multiple latent factors and partition the model parameters into multiple parts, where each part corresponds to a single latent factor. Our FedIIH not only properly computes the distribution similarities between subgraphs, but also learns disentangled representations that are robust to irrelevant factors within subgraphs, so that it successfully considers the inter- and intra- heterogeneity simultaneously. Extensive experiments on six homophilic and five heterophilic graph datasets in both non-overlapping and overlapping settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method when compared with nine state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, FedIIH averagely outperforms the second-best method by a large margin of 5.79% on all heterophilic datasets.