# Calibrating and Improving Graph Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11525 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11525/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Pitfalls of Graph Neural Network Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05868/) (2018)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [MINE: Mutual Information Neural Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04062/) (2018)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03578/) (2015)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [A Theoretical Analysis of Contrastive Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09229/) (2019)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [Does Invariant Graph Learning via Environment Augmentation Learn Invariance?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19035/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Self-Supervised Graph Foundation Models: Knowledge-Based Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16137/) (2024)
- [Graph Prompting for Graph Learning Models: Recent Advances and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08326/) (2025)
- [StructComp: Substituting Propagation with Structural Compression in Training Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04865/) (2023)
- [Barlow Graph Auto-Encoder for Unsupervised Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15742/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph contrastive learning algorithms have demonstrated remarkable success in various applications such as node classification, link prediction, and graph clustering. However, in unsupervised graph contrastive learning, some contrastive pairs may contradict the truths in downstream tasks and thus the decrease of losses on these pairs undesirably harms the performance in the downstream tasks. To assess the discrepancy between the prediction and the ground-truth in the downstream tasks for these contrastive pairs, we adapt the expected calibration error (ECE) to graph contrastive learning. The analysis of ECE motivates us to propose a novel regularization method, Contrast-Reg, to ensure that decreasing the contrastive loss leads to better performance in the downstream tasks. As a plug-in regularizer, Contrast-Reg effectively improves the performance of existing graph contrastive learning algorithms. We provide both theoretical and empirical results to demonstrate the effectiveness of Contrast-Reg in enhancing the generalizability of the Graph Neural Network(GNN) model and improving the performance of graph contrastive algorithms with different similarity definitions and encoder backbones across various downstream tasks.