# Towards Graph Self-Supervised Learning with Contrastive Adjusted Zooming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.10698 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10698/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00388/) (2020)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [SchNet: A continuous-filter convolutional neural network for modeling quantum interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08566/) (2017)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Improves Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05485/) (2019)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [Deep Convolutional Networks on Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05163/) (2015)
- [Graph Representation Learning via Graphical Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01169/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10083/) (2022)
- [Towards Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06367/) (2022)
- [Rethinking and Scaling Up Graph Contrastive Learning: An Extremely Efficient Approach with Group Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01535/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning via Cross Reconstruction Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09928/) (2022)
- [Dink-Net: Neural Clustering on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18405/) (2023)
- [PREM: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Node-Level Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11676/) (2023)
- [Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08792/) (2022)
- [From Unsupervised to Few-shot Graph Anomaly Detection: A Multi-scale Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05525/) (2022)
- [Affinity Uncertainty-based Hard Negative Mining in Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13340/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Self-Supervised Graph Foundation Models: Knowledge-Based Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16137/) (2024)
- [BP-SGCN: Behavioral Pseudo-Label Informed Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian and Heterogeneous Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14676/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Graph Contrastive Learning through Relative Similarity Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05533/) (2025)
- [Local Structure-aware Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03271/) (2023)
- [Graph Representation Learning via Aggregation Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12843/) (2022)
- [A Hierarchical Framework with Spatio-Temporal Consistency Learning for Emergence Detection in Complex Adaptive Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10300/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph representation learning (GRL) is critical for graph-structured data analysis. However, most of the existing graph neural networks (GNNs) heavily rely on labeling information, which is normally expensive to obtain in the real world. Although some existing works aim to effectively learn graph representations in an unsupervised manner, they suffer from certain limitations, such as the heavy reliance on monotone contrastiveness and limited scalability. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we introduce a novel self-supervised graph representation learning algorithm via Graph Contrastive Adjusted Zooming, namely G-Zoom, to learn node representations by leveraging the proposed adjusted zooming scheme. Specifically, this mechanism enables G-Zoom to explore and extract self-supervision signals from a graph from multiple scales: micro (i.e., node-level), meso (i.e., neighborhood-level), and macro (i.e., subgraph-level). Firstly, we generate two augmented views of the input graph via two different graph augmentations. Then, we establish three different contrastiveness on the above three scales progressively, from node, neighboring, to subgraph level, where we maximize the agreement between graph representations across scales. While we can extract valuable clues from a given graph on the micro and macro perspectives, the neighboring-level contrastiveness offers G-Zoom the capability of a customizable option based on our adjusted zooming scheme to manually choose an optimal viewpoint that lies between the micro and macro perspectives to better understand the graph data. Additionally, to make our model scalable to large graphs, we employ a parallel graph diffusion approach to decouple model training from the graph size. We have conducted extensive experiments on real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods consistently.