Topology-Aware Feature Sorting Enables Universal Modeling on Homophilic and Heterophilic Graphs

Recently, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a central focus in the field of graph learning due to their strong generalizability to various unseen graphs. However, existing GFMs typically work under the homophily assumption, and the exploration of universality on heterophilic graphs is still in its early stages. In fact, even in homophilic graphs, there exists limited yet informative heterophilic information that is not fully exploited by current GFMs. Moreover, due to the requirement for universality, the heterophily issue faced by GFMs is more challenging than in classical graph learning, as it requires training a single model to adapt to varying structures, features, and tasks. Classic heterophilic graph learning methods primarily based on the node-level homophily or heterophily. However, we highlight that homophily and heterophily exist not only at the node semantic level, but also at a finer granularity across individual feature dimensions. This finding enables GFMs to adapt to heterophilic graphs and better utilize the small amount of heterophilic information in homophilic graphs. Based on this, we propose Topology-aware Feature Sorting Graph Foundation Model (TFSGFM), which employs a feature-level topology-aware sorting strategy and a dual-channel graph neural network framework, enabling unified modeling of both feature and structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong generalizability of TFSGFM. The source code is available at https://github.com/hedongxiao-tju/TFSGFM.