Beyond Graph Distribution Shifts: LLMs, Adaptation, and Generalization

Abstract

Graph machine learning has witnessed rapid progress across both academia and industry. However, most existing methods are developed under the in-distribution (I.D.) hypothesis, which assumes that training and testing graph data are drawn from the same distribution. In real-world applications—ranging from dynamic knowledge graphs to evolving biomedical networks—this assumption is frequently violated, resulting in severe performance degradation under distribution shifts. Addressing this challenge has become a key focus in recent years, leading to the development of novel paradigms that move beyond the I.D. setting. This tutorial presents a comprehensive overview of three emerging and synergistic directions for tackling distribution shifts in graph learning. First, we highlight Graph LLMs, which combine the representational power of large language models with graph structures to enable flexible, in-context, and few-shot learning on graphs. Second, we introduce adaptation techniques for both GNNs and Graph LLMs, including graph neural architecture search and continual learning strategies for evolving data. Third, we cover generalization methods that incorporate causality and invariance principles to build robust graph models under unseen distributions. We will advocate novel, high-quality research findings, as well as innovative solutions to the challenging problems in graph machine learning under distribution shifts and the applications on graphs. This topic is at the core of the scope of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and is attractive to machine learning as well as data mining audience from both academia and industry.