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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

FedProG: Federated Graph Learning via Server-Side LLM Semantic Bridging and Uncertainty-Aware Distillation

Haitao Wang, Haozhao Wang, Wenchao Xu, Yichen Li, Xiaoquan Yi, Tianzhe Xiao, Jingcai Guo, Ruixuan Li

Abstract

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) on Text-Attributed Graphs often encounters the missing neighbor issue. This problem arises from structural fragmentation across dispersed clients, which restricts the effective message passing of Graph Neural Networks. Current completion methods frequently struggle in cross-domain, non-IID scenarios because they lack access to external knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose FedProG, an asymmetric framework that utilizes a frozen server-side LLM to reconstruct missing structural contexts. Furthermore, deploying Large Language Models locally to augment these graphs incurs prohibitive computational costs for edge devices. We introduce a split architecture where a lightweight client-side generator maps graph features into the LLM’s embedding space. This allows the server to produce virtual neighbors via uploaded soft prompts. To ensure system reliability and privacy, we implement a dual-guard mechanism: a server-side uncertainty filter rejects low-confidence generations through multi-path sampling, while a client-side semantic consistency projector maintains utility under differential privacy. Experiments show that FedProG improves robustness and generalization over baselines while drastically reducing client computational overhead.

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