HePa: Heterogeneous Graph Prompting for All-Level Classification Tasks

Heterogeneous graphs, which are common in real-world downstream tasks, have recently sparked a wave of research interest. The performance of end-to-end heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) greatly relies on supervised training for specific tasks. To reduce the labeling cost, the "pretrain-finetune" paradigm has been widely adopted, but it leads to a knowledge gap between the pre-trained model and downstream tasks. In an effort to address this gap, the "pretrain-prompt" paradigm has emerged as a promising approach. This involves fine-tuning randomly initialized learnable vectors in downstream tasks. However, this approach may result in an insufficient representation of downstream task features. Existing techniques for heterogeneous graph prompting restructure the heterogeneous graph to align with the homogeneous graph prompting scheme. This can potentially introduce the same limitations as homogeneous graph prompt learning. In this paper, we propose HePa, short for Heterogeneous Graph Prompting for all-level classification tasks. It not only includes a unified prompt template-graph adapted for heterogeneous graphs but also introduces a novel pre-prompt token optimized during the pre-training phase to convey task information downstream. With these designs, HePa can complete all levels of classification tasks toward few-shot scenarios while activating in-context learning. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive experimental analysis of HePa on three benchmark datasets.