No Arabic abstract
Contrastive learning (CL) has proven highly effective in graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL), since it can efficiently supplement the limited task information from the annotated nodes in graph. However, existing graph CL (GCL) studies ignore the uneven distribution of task information across graph caused by the graph topology and the selection of annotated nodes. They apply CL to the whole graph evenly, which results in an incongruous combination of CL and graph learning. To address this issue, we propose to apply CL in the graph learning adaptively by taking the received task information of each node into consideration. Firstly, we introduce Group PageRank to measure the node information gain from graph and find that CL mainly works for nodes that are topologically far away from the labeled nodes. We then propose our Distance-wise Graph Contrastive Learning (DwGCL) method from two views:(1) From the global view of the task information distribution across the graph, we enhance the CL effect on nodes that are topologically far away from labeled nodes; (2) From the personal view of each nodes received information, we measure the relative distance between nodes and then we adapt the sampling strategy of GCL accordingly. Extensive experiments on five benchmark graph datasets show that DwGCL can bring a clear improvement over previous GCL methods. Our analysis on eight graph neural network with various types of architecture and three different annotation settings further demonstrates the generalizability of DwGCL.
Graph-level representations are critical in various real-world applications, such as predicting the properties of molecules. But in practice, precise graph annotations are generally very expensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, graph contrastive learning constructs instance discrimination task which pulls together positive pairs (augmentation pairs of the same graph) and pushes away negative pairs (augmentation pairs of different graphs) for unsupervised representation learning. However, since for a query, its negatives are uniformly sampled from all graphs, existing methods suffer from the critical sampling bias issue, i.e., the negatives likely having the same semantic structure with the query, leading to performance degradation. To mitigate this sampling bias issue, in this paper, we propose a Prototypical Graph Contrastive Learning (PGCL) approach. Specifically, PGCL models the underlying semantic structure of the graph data via clustering semantically similar graphs into the same group, and simultaneously encourages the clustering consistency for different augmentations of the same graph. Then given a query, it performs negative sampling via drawing the graphs from those clusters that differ from the cluster of query, which ensures the semantic difference between query and its negative samples. Moreover, for a query, PGCL further reweights its negative samples based on the distance between their prototypes (cluster centroids) and the query prototype such that those negatives having moderate prototype distance enjoy relatively large weights. This reweighting strategy is proved to be more effective than uniform sampling. Experimental results on various graph benchmarks testify the advantages of our PGCL over state-of-the-art methods.
Graph representation learning has attracted a surge of interest recently, whose target at learning discriminant embedding for each node in the graph. Most of these representation methods focus on supervised learning and heavily depend on label information. However, annotating graphs are expensive to obtain in the real world, especially in specialized domains (i.e. biology), as it needs the annotator to have the domain knowledge to label the graph. To approach this problem, self-supervised learning provides a feasible solution for graph representation learning. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Level Graph Contrastive Learning (MLGCL) framework for learning robust representation of graph data by contrasting space views of graphs. Specifically, we introduce a novel contrastive view - topological and feature space views. The original graph is first-order approximation structure and contains uncertainty or error, while the $k$NN graph generated by encoding features preserves high-order proximity. Thus $k$NN graph generated by encoding features not only provide a complementary view, but is more suitable to GNN encoder to extract discriminant representation. Furthermore, we develop a multi-level contrastive mode to preserve the local similarity and semantic similarity of graph-structured data simultaneously. Extensive experiments indicate MLGCL achieves promising results compared with the existing state-of-the-art graph representation learning methods on seven datasets.
Deep learning models are modern tools for spatio-temporal graph (STG) forecasting. Despite their effectiveness, they require large-scale datasets to achieve better performance and are vulnerable to noise perturbation. To alleviate these limitations, an intuitive idea is to use the popular data augmentation and contrastive learning techniques. However, existing graph contrastive learning methods cannot be directly applied to STG forecasting due to three reasons. First, we empirically discover that the forecasting task is unable to benefit from the pretrained representations derived from contrastive learning. Second, data augmentations that are used for defeating noise are less explored for STG data. Third, the semantic similarity of samples has been overlooked. In this paper, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning framework (STGCL) to tackle these issues. Specifically, we improve the performance by integrating the forecasting loss with an auxiliary contrastive loss rather than using a pretrained paradigm. We elaborate on four types of data augmentations, which disturb data in terms of graph structure, time domain, and frequency domain. We also extend the classic contrastive loss through a rule-based strategy that filters out the most semantically similar negatives. Our framework is evaluated across three real-world datasets and four state-of-the-art models. The consistent improvements demonstrate that STGCL can be used as an off-the-shelf plug-in for existing deep models.
Self-supervised learning of graph neural networks (GNN) is in great need because of the widespread label scarcity issue in real-world graph/network data. Graph contrastive learning (GCL), by training GNNs to maximize the correspondence between the representations of the same graph in its different augmented forms, may yield robust and transferable GNNs even without using labels. However, GNNs trained by traditional GCL often risk capturing redundant graph features and thus may be brittle and provide sub-par performance in downstream tasks. Here, we propose a novel principle, termed adversarial-GCL (AD-GCL), which enables GNNs to avoid capturing redundant information during the training by optimizing adversarial graph augmentation strategies used in GCL. We pair AD-GCL with theoretical explanations and design a practical instantiation based on trainable edge-dropping graph augmentation. We experimentally validate AD-GCL by comparing with the state-of-the-art GCL methods and achieve performance gains of up-to $14%$ in unsupervised, $6%$ in transfer, and $3%$ in semi-supervised learning settings overall with 18 different benchmark datasets for the tasks of molecule property regression and classification, and social network classification.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.