The Universal Classifier for Graph Learning

Abstract:While foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision by leveraging universal vocabularies, Graph Machine Learning (GML) remains fractured due to the absence of a unified feature and structural representation across diverse domains. Existing works claiming to be Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) are typically restricted to node-level predictions or require fixed feature dimensions, failing to provide a truly task-agnostic backbone for the full spectrum of graph learning applications. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Classifier (UC), which supports arbitrary feature and class cardinalities, unifying node-, edge-, and graph-level objectives under a single similarity-based classification objective. The UC reformulates all node-, edge-, and graph-level prediction tasks as maximizing similarity in the latent space: by lifting heterogeneous features and labels into 3D latent tensors, the model learns transferable features independent of specific input schemas. This architecture allows a single pre-trained model to generalize to node classification, node regression, and link prediction across unseen graphs with varying feature semantics. Experiments show strong zero-shot transfer performance across node-, link-, and graph-level tasks.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.36302 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.36302v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.36302 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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