PreGS: A Parameter-Transfer-Based Multi-Expert Graph Neural Network for Node Classification

Abstract

Graph neural networks have achieved strong performance in node classification by aggregating information from graph neighborhoods. However, a single aggregation mechanism may be insufficient to capture diverse structural patterns across graph datasets. Moreover, independently training multiple structural branches can introduce substantial overhead without necessarily producing stable node representations. To address these issues, this paper proposes PreGS, a parameter-transfer-based multi-expert graph neural network framework. PreGS first pretrains a multi-head graph attention network (GAT) and transfers the linear transformation weights of its first-layer attention heads to multiple GraphSAGE experts. The transferred experts are frozen and used as complementary structural branches. The fused raw node features, GAT head representations, and GraphSAGE expert representations are fed into a multilayer perceptron (MLP), whose output is further fused with the pretrained GAT logits. Based on PreGS, we further develop PreGSv2, which introduces source-level weighting and a structural gating mechanism for adaptive multi-source feature integration. Experiments on eight public graph datasets show that PreGS and PreGSv2 achieve competitive performance against representative graph neural network baselines. Ablation, parameter-transfer, sensitivity, aggregator, visualization, and training-time analyses further validate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed framework. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/LH-Czc/PreGS.