# Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/

## Key facts

- Cited by 519 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 519)

- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning Automated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07594/) (2021)
- [GraphGPT: Graph Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13023/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Graph Augmentation to Improve Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05819/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Representation Learning on Graphs via Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06514/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Graph Neural Networks: A Unified Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10757/) (2021)
- [SimGRACE: A Simple Framework for Graph Contrastive Learning without Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03104/) (2022)
- [All in One: Multi-task Prompting for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01504/) (2023)
- [From Canonical Correlation Analysis to Self-supervised Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12484/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Learning on Graphs: Contrastive, Generative,or Predictive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07342/) (2021)
- [Data Augmentation for Deep Graph Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08235/) (2022)
- [GraphMAE2: A Decoding-Enhanced Masked Self-Supervised Graph Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04779/) (2023)
- [Towards Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06367/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01116/) (2021)
- [Augmentation-Free Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02472/) (2021)
- [Improving Graph Collaborative Filtering with Neighborhood-enriched Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06200/) (2022)
- [Graph Barlow Twins: A self-supervised representation learning framework for graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02466/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Graph Meets Large Language Model: Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12399/) (2023)
- [ZeroG: Investigating Cross-dataset Zero-shot Transferability in Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11235/) (2024)
- [What's Behind the Mask: Understanding Masked Graph Modeling for Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10053/) (2022)
- [Mining Latent Structures for Multimedia Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09036/) (2021)
- [OpenGraph: Towards Open Graph Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01121/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervised Learning for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04475/) (2022)
- [AutoGCL: Automated Graph Contrastive Learning via Learnable View Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10259/) (2021)
- [ProGCL: Rethinking Hard Negative Mining in Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02027/) (2021)
- [LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08191/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05055/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Graph Structure Learning: Progress and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03036/) (2021)
- [Graph Rationalization with Environment-based Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02886/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.