Dissecting Federated-Graph Aggregation under Domain Shift: Importance-Aware Aggregation via Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Federated graph learning (FGL) trains a shared graph model across clients whose local graphs differ in node features, labels, and connectivity while keeping raw graph data decentralized. Although graph-domain shifts across clients can severely degrade the global model, existing FGL approaches for graph-domain shift mainly adapt local representations, propagation, or graph-derived collaboration, while the server typically applies the same aggregation rule to every parameter coordinate. In this work, we analyze how graph-domain shifts affect server-side aggregation. We find that, as clients optimize under distinct graph-domain conditions, they gradually concentrate their strongest updates on different parameter coordinates, making important update coordinates less shared across clients. Consequently, standard averaging can weaken these domain-specific signals even when client updates are not directly opposed. These findings reveal an aggregationinduced signal dilution effect: parameter coordinates strongly expressed by only a subset of domains are attenuated by nearzero contributions from the remaining domains. Motivated by these findings, we propose FedIA, a lightweight serverside aggregation method that calibrates parameter selection and client weighting. FedIA identifies important coordinates =within each layer and adjusts client aggregation weights according to their contributions on the selected subspace, without modifying local graph training or the standard clientupdate payload. Experiments on Twitch Gamers and WikiNet using two graph-learning backbones and nine FL/FGL baselines show improvements of up to 11.58 percentage points, with particularly strong gains under domain skew.