# Graph-wise Common Latent Factor Extraction for Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.08830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08830/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [Analyzing Learned Molecular Representations for Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01561/) (2019)
- [GuacaMol: Benchmarking Models for De Novo Molecular Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09621/) (2018)
- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Symmetric Graph Convolutional Autoencoder for Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02441/) (2019)
- [Non-Local Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14612/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Model Selection for Variational Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12614/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Kernel Networks for Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05189/) (2020)
- [DDGK: Learning Graph Representations for Deep Divergence Graph Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09671/) (2019)
- [Joint Estimation of Low-Rank Components and Connectivity Graph in High-Dimensional Graph Signals: Application to Brain Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02303/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Unsupervised Graph Neural Architecture Search with Disentangled Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05064/) (2024)
- [Introducing Diminutive Causal Structure into Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08709/) (2024)
- [Introducing Expertise Logic into Graph Representation Learning from A Causal Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08496/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised graph-level representation learning plays a crucial role in a variety of tasks such as molecular property prediction and community analysis, especially when data annotation is expensive. Currently, most of the best-performing graph embedding methods are based on Infomax principle. The performance of these methods highly depends on the selection of negative samples and hurt the performance, if the samples were not carefully selected. Inter-graph similarity-based methods also suffer if the selected set of graphs for similarity matching is low in quality. To address this, we focus only on utilizing the current input graph for embedding learning. We are motivated by an observation from real-world graph generation processes where the graphs are formed based on one or more global factors which are common to all elements of the graph (e.g., topic of a discussion thread, solubility level of a molecule). We hypothesize extracting these common factors could be highly beneficial. Hence, this work proposes a new principle for unsupervised graph representation learning: Graph-wise Common latent Factor EXtraction (GCFX). We further propose a deep model for GCFX, deepGCFX, based on the idea of reversing the above-mentioned graph generation process which could explicitly extract common latent factors from an input graph and achieve improved results on downstream tasks to the current state-of-the-art. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that, while extracting common latent factors is beneficial for graph-level tasks to alleviate distractions caused by local variations of individual nodes or local neighbourhoods, it also benefits node-level tasks by enabling long-range node dependencies, especially for disassortative graphs.