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Contrastive learning is an effective unsupervised method in graph representation learning. The key component of contrastive learning lies in the construction of positive and negative samples. Previous methods usually utilize the proximity of nodes in the graph as the principle. Recently, the data-augmentation-based contrastive learning method has advanced to show great power in the visual domain, and some works have extended this method from images to graphs. However, unlike the data augmentation on images, the data augmentation on graphs is far less intuitive and it is much harder to provide high-quality contrastive samples, which leaves much space for improvement. In this work, by introducing an adversarial graph view for data augmentation, we propose a simple but effective method,Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning(ArieL), to extract informative contrastive samples within reasonable constraints. We develop a new technique calledinformation regularizationfor stable training and use subgraph sampling for scalability. We generalize our method from node-level contrastive learning to the graph level by treating each graph instance as a super-node.ArieLconsistently outperforms the current graph contrastive learning methods for both node-level and graph-level classification tasks on real-world datasets. We further demonstrate thatArieLis more robust in the face of adversarial attacks.more » « less
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Graphs are powerful representations for relations among objects, which have attracted plenty of attention in both academia and industry. A fundamental challenge for graph learning is how to train an effective Graph Neural Network (GNN) encoder without labels, which are expensive and time consuming to obtain. Contrastive Learning (CL) is one of the most popular paradigms to address this challenge, which trains GNNs by discriminating positive and negative node pairs. Despite the success of recent CL methods, there are still two under-explored problems. Firstly, how to reduce the semantic error introduced by random topology based data augmentations. Traditional CL defines positive and negative node pairs via the node-level topological proximity, which is solely based on the graph topology regardless of the semantic information of node attributes, and thus some semantically similar nodes could be wrongly treated as negative pairs. Secondly, how to effectively model the multiplexity of the real-world graphs, where nodes are connected by various relations and each relation could form a homogeneous graph layer. To solve these problems, we propose a novel multiplex heterogeneous graph prototypical contrastive leaning (X-GOAL) framework to extract node embeddings. X-GOAL is comprised of two components: the GOAL framework, which learns node embeddings for each homogeneous graph layer, and an alignment regularization, which jointly models different layers by aligning layer-specific node embeddings. Specifically, the GOAL framework captures the node-level information by a succinct graph transformation technique, and captures the cluster-level information by pulling nodes within the same semantic cluster closer in the embedding space. The alignment regularization aligns embeddings across layers at both node level and cluster level. We evaluate the proposed X-GOAL on a variety of real-world datasets and downstream tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the X-GOAL framework.more » « less
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Graph representation learning is crucial for many real-world ap- plications (e.g. social relation analysis). A fundamental problem for graph representation learning is how to effectively learn rep- resentations without human labeling, which is usually costly and time-consuming. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) addresses this problem by pulling the positive node pairs (or similar nodes) closer while pushing the negative node pairs (or dissimilar nodes) apart in the representation space. Despite the success of the existing GCL methods, they primarily sample node pairs based on the node- level proximity yet the community structures have rarely been taken into consideration. As a result, two nodes from the same community might be sampled as a negative pair. We argue that the community information should be considered to identify node pairs in the same communities, where the nodes insides are seman- tically similar. To address this issue, we propose a novel Graph Communal Contrastive Learning (ππΆπππΏ) framework to jointly learn the community partition and learn node representations in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, the proposed ππΆπππΏ consists of two components: a Dense Community Aggregation (π·ππΆπ΄) algo- rithm for community detection and a Reweighted Self-supervised Cross-contrastive (π πππΆ) training scheme to utilize the community information. Additionally, the real-world graphs are complex and often consist of multiple views. In this paper, we demonstrate that the proposed ππΆπππΏ can also be naturally adapted to multiplex graphs. Finally, we comprehensively evaluate the proposed ππΆπππΏ on a variety of real-world graphs. The experimental results show that the ππΆπππΏ outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.more » « less
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Contrastive learning is an effective unsupervised method in graph representation learning. Recently, the data augmentation based con- trastive learning method has been extended from images to graphs. However, most prior works are directly adapted from the models designed for images. Unlike the data augmentation on images, the data augmentation on graphs is far less intuitive and much harder to provide high-quality contrastive samples, which are the key to the performance of contrastive learning models. This leaves much space for improvement over the existing graph contrastive learning frameworks. In this work, by introducing an adversarial graph view and an information regularizer, we propose a simple but effective method, Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning (ArieL), to extract informative contrastive samples within a reasonable constraint. It consistently outperforms the current graph contrastive learning methods in the node classification task over various real-world datasets and further improves the robustness of graph contrastive learning.more » « less
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