Feng Yu

Yanqiao Zhu, Yichen Xu, Feng Yu et al.

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.

Yanqiao Zhu, Yichen Xu, Feng Yu et al.

Unsupervised graph representation learning aims to learn low-dimensional node embeddings without supervision while preserving graph topological structures and node attributive features. Previous graph neural networks (GNN) require a large number of labeled nodes, which may not be accessible in real-world graph data. In this paper, we present a novel cluster-aware graph neural network (CAGNN) model for unsupervised graph representation learning using self-supervised techniques. In CAGNN, we perform clustering on the node embeddings and update the model parameters by predicting the cluster assignments. Moreover, we observe that graphs often contain inter-class edges, which mislead the GNN model to aggregate noisy information from neighborhood nodes. We further refine the graph topology by strengthening intra-class edges and reducing node connections between different classes based on cluster labels, which better preserves cluster structures in the embedding space. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two benchmark tasks using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model over existing baseline methods. Notably, our model gains over 7% improvements in terms of accuracy on node clustering over state-of-the-arts.

Yanqiao Zhu, Yichen Xu, Feng Yu et al.

Graph representation learning nowadays becomes fundamental in analyzing graph-structured data. Inspired by recent success of contrastive methods, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for unsupervised graph representation learning by leveraging a contrastive objective at the node level. Specifically, we generate two graph views by corruption and learn node representations by maximizing the agreement of node representations in these two views. To provide diverse node contexts for the contrastive objective, we propose a hybrid scheme for generating graph views on both structure and attribute levels. Besides, we provide theoretical justification behind our motivation from two perspectives, mutual information and the classical triplet loss. We perform empirical experiments on both transductive and inductive learning tasks using a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental experiments demonstrate that despite its simplicity, our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by large margins. Moreover, our unsupervised method even surpasses its supervised counterparts on transductive tasks, demonstrating its great potential in real-world applications.