SpeAr: A Spectral Approach for Zero-Shot Node Classification

Zero-shot node classification is a vital task in the field of graph data processing, aiming to identify nodes of classes unseen during the training process. Prediction bias is one of the primary challenges in zero-shot node classification, referring to the model’s propensity to misclassify nodes of unseen classes as seen classes. However, most methods introduce external knowledge to mitigate the bias, inadequately leveraging the inherent cluster information within the unlabeled nodes. To address this issue, we employ spectral analysis coupled with learnable class prototypes to discover the implicit cluster structures within the graph, providing a more comprehensive understanding of classes. In this paper, we propose a Spe ctral A pp r oach for zero-shot node classification (SpeAr). Specifically, we establish an approximate relationship between minimizing the spectral contrastive loss and performing spectral decomposition on the graph, thereby enabling effective node characterization through loss minimization. Subsequently, the class prototypes are iteratively refined based on the learned node representations, initialized with the semantic vectors. Finally, extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the SpeAr, which can further alleviate the bias problem.