SUCRe: Selective Uncertainty-Aware Contrastive Representation for Graph Transfer Learning

Abstract

Graph transfer learning (GTL) provides a promising paradigm for adapting knowledge from source graphs with sufficient labels to label-scarce target graphs. However, existing approaches often assume that transferred knowledge is uniformly reliable, ignoring the different transferability of samples caused by structural and distribution shifts across graphs. This limitation leads to negative transfer and unnecessary computational overhead. In this work, we propose SUCRe, a selective uncertainty-aware contrastive representation method for GTL. The key idea is to selectively adapt and transfer graph knowledge according to its estimated reliability. Specifically, we introduce structure-aware entropy-based matching discrepancy, which jointly models feature uncertainty and structural coherence to ensure accurate feature adaptation between graphs. Moreover, we develop a domain-aware semi-hard negative sampling strategy that constructs informative contrastive sets by filtering unreliable cross-domain relationships, reducing computational redundancy while enhancing representation discrimination. Extensive experiments on graph transfer benchmarks demonstrate that SUCRe achieves competitive performance with improved efficiency.