# Beyond Feature and Structure Alignment: Learning Transferable Propagation Knowledge for Graph Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28980 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28980/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07243/) (2019)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02260/) (2020)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11174/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems: Challenges, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12843/) (2021)
- [Position: Graph Foundation Models are Already Here](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02216/) (2024)
- [GFT: Graph Foundation Model with Transferable Tree Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06070/) (2024)
- [SAMGPT: Text-free Graph Foundation Model for Multi-domain Pre-training and Cross-domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05424/) (2025)
- [GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09709/) (2024)
- [AnyGraph: Graph Foundation Model in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10700/) (2024)
- [Text-Free Multi-domain Graph Pre-training: Toward Graph Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13934/) (2024)
- [Multi-Domain Graph Foundation Models: Robust Knowledge Transfer via Topology Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02017/) (2025)
- [RiemannGFM: Learning a Graph Foundation Model from Riemannian Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03251/) (2025)
- [End-to-End Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13193/) (2023)
- [Towards Graph Foundation Models: Training on Knowledge Graphs Enables Transferability to General Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12609/) (2024)
- [MUG: Meta-path-aware Universal Heterogeneous Graph Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22645/) (2026)
- [LEDA: Latent Semantic Distribution Alignment for Multi-domain Graph Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22660/) (2026)
- [Relation-Aware Graph Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12027/) (2025)

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

- [More Domains, No Gains? FLO: Fast-Slow Reciprocal Learning for Multi-Domain Graph Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14748/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling knowledge transfer across diverse domains. Unlike traditional graph learning methods that are typically designed for in-domain settings, GFMs aim to learn transferable knowledge that can generalize to unseen graph domains. However, unlike language or visual data, graphs lack intrinsic and unified representation units, such as tokens in language and patches in vision, making it challenging to identify transferable knowledge units for building graph foundation models. Existing graph foundation models mainly focus on mitigating domain discrepancies through feature alignment and structure alignment, while overlooking the exploration of transferable knowledge units underlying graph data. Moreover, these methods generally rely on fixed propagation mechanisms during message passing, overlooking the heterogeneity in propagation patterns, as different edges may exhibit distinct propagation patterns for different feature dimensions. To address these limitations, we propose a Propagation-aware Graph Foundation Model (ProGFM), which regards the propagation relationships between edges and feature dimensions as transferable knowledge units. Through a propagation relationship prototype bank, ProGFM learns cross-domain transferable propagation knowledge, enabling adaptive information aggregation in unseen graph domains. Extensive experiments across various cross-domain transfer scenarios demonstrate that ProGFM possesses strong cross-domain knowledge transfer capability and exhibits superior generalization performance compared with existing methods.