# GFMate: Empowering Graph Foundation Models with Test-time Prompt Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Pitfalls of Graph Neural Network Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05868/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07988/) (2020)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [MEMO: Test Time Robustness via Adaptation and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09506/) (2021)
- [GPT-GNN: Generative Pre-Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15437/) (2020)
- [One for All: Towards Training One Graph Model for All Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00149/) (2023)
- [LLaGA: Large Language and Graph Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08170/) (2024)
- [GraphPrompt: Unifying Pre-Training and Downstream Tasks for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08043/) (2023)
- [Diverse Data Augmentation with Diffusions for Effective Test-time Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06038/) (2023)
- [All in One: Multi-task Prompting for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01504/) (2023)
- [Graph Foundation Models: Concepts, Opportunities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11829/) (2023)
- [Align Your Prompts: Test-Time Prompting with Distribution Alignment for Zero-Shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01459/) (2023)
- [Universal Prompt Tuning for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15240/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Aggregation of Diverse Experts for Test-Agnostic Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09249/) (2021)
- [Learning from Complementary Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07541/) (2017)
- [All in One and One for All: A Simple yet Effective Method towards Cross-domain Graph Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09834/) (2024)
- [ZeroG: Investigating Cross-dataset Zero-shot Transferability in Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11235/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Call Neighbours Yourself: Graph Walks with Destination-Conditioned On-Policy Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29588/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph prompt tuning has shown great potential in graph learning by introducing trainable prompts to enhance the model performance in conventional single-domain scenarios. Recent research has extended graph prompts to improve Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) by few-shot tuning auxiliary prompts. Despite their progress, most existing methods embed source-domain information into prompts, which serve either as input to GFMs or encoded during model pre-training. Such prompt entanglement with specific source domains and GFM pre-training strategy restricts their generalisability to other domains and different GFMs. Furthermore, existing GFM prompts merely rely on few-shot tuning for adaptation, neglecting the rich information in unlabelled target domain test data. Motivated by these insights, this paper aims to empower GFMs with pre-training-agnostic test-time graph prompt tuning, named GFMate. GFMate introduces centroid and layer prompts applied after pre-training on target domains, avoiding entanglement with specific source domains and model pre-training. In addition, a test-time complementary learning objective is devised to exploit both labelled and unlabelled target domain data for effective test-time prompt tuning. Extensive experiments on 12 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of GFMate, achieving improvements of up to 30.63%. Code is available at https://github.com/YanJiangJerry/GFMate.