Paper Detail

Analytic Drift Resister for Non-Exemplar Continual Graph Learning

Lei Song, Shihan Guan, Youyong Kong

arxiv Score 16.0

Published 2026-04-03 · First seen 2026-04-07

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Non-Exemplar Continual Graph Learning (NECGL) seeks to eliminate the privacy risks intrinsic to rehearsal-based paradigms by retaining solely class-level prototype representations rather than raw graph examples for mitigating catastrophic forgetting. However, this design choice inevitably precipitates feature drift. As a nascent alternative, Analytic Continual Learning (ACL) capitalizes on the intrinsic generalization properties of frozen pre-trained models to bolster continual learning performance. Nonetheless, a key drawback resides in the pronounced attenuation of model plasticity. To surmount these challenges, we propose Analytic Drift Resister (ADR), a novel and theoretically grounded NECGL framework. ADR exploits iterative backpropagation to break free from the frozen pre-trained constraint, adapting to evolving task graph distributions and fortifying model plasticity. Since parameter updates trigger feature drift, we further propose Hierarchical Analytic Merging (HAM), performing layer-wise merging of linear transformations in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) via ridge regression, thereby ensuring absolute resistance to feature drift. On this basis, Analytic Classifier Reconstruction (ACR) enables theoretically zero-forgetting class-incremental learning. Empirical evaluation on four node classification benchmarks demonstrates that ADR maintains strong competitiveness against existing state-of-the-art methods.

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BibTeX

@article{song2026analytic,
  title = {Analytic Drift Resister for Non-Exemplar Continual Graph Learning},
  author = {Lei Song and Shihan Guan and Youyong Kong},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Non-Exemplar Continual Graph Learning (NECGL) seeks to eliminate the privacy risks intrinsic to rehearsal-based paradigms by retaining solely class-level prototype representations rather than raw graph examples for mitigating catastrophic forgetting. However, this design choice inevitably precipitates feature drift. As a nascent alternative, Analytic Continual Learning (ACL) capitalizes on the intrinsic generalization properties of frozen pre-trained models to bolster continual learning performa},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02633},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2604.02633},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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