Yunfeng Zhou
2025
Fair Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning
Ruilin Luo
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Tianle Gu
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Lin Wang
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Yunfeng Zhou
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Songtao Jiang
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Lei Wang
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Yujiu Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), which integrate text and graph structures, have recently gained traction, especially in web applications. However, as a graph structure, TAG representation learning (TAGRL) naturally inherits issues from Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), such as fairness. Moreover, previous TAGRL research has mainly focused on using LM-as-encoder to boost downstream task performance, with little consideration given to whether this process may raise additional concerns related to fairness and other safety-related issues. As the first work to explore fairness in TAGRL, this paper proposes the concept of evolving LM-as-encoder to LM-as-fair-encoder, developing a two-stage fairness-aware alignment process called FairTAG based on the observed issues. Specifically, we first mitigate the tendency of LMs to overfit to homophily during downstream tasks fine-tuning, followed by subgraph-level connection behavior preference optimization for selected anchor nodes. We provide theoretical support and demonstrate the feasibility of LM-as-fair-encoder through extensive experiments and ablation studies. We also show that FairTAG can be seamlessly integrated with fairness-enhancing strategies on the GNNs decoder side, thus innovatively constructing a plug-and-play learning framework.
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- Tianle Gu 1
- Songtao Jiang 1
- Ruilin Luo 1
- Lin Wang 1
- Lei Wang (王雷) 1
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