# SimGRACE: A Simple Framework for Graph Contrastive Learning without Data Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03104 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03104/

## Key facts

- Cited by 171 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [TUDataset: A collection of benchmark datasets for learning with graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08663/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [Exploring Generalization in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08947/) (2017)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [GPT-GNN: Generative Pre-Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15437/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Attack on Graph Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02371/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning Automated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07594/) (2021)
- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Bridging Mode Connectivity in Loss Landscapes and Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00060/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Embeddings of Latent Variable Models for Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05629/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Study of Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01116/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 171)

- [GraphGPT: Graph Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13023/) (2023)
- [All in One: Multi-task Prompting for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01504/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Universal Prompt Tuning for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15240/) (2022)
- [All in One and One for All: A Simple yet Effective Method towards Cross-domain Graph Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09834/) (2024)
- [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)
- [GIMLET: A Unified Graph-Text Model for Instruction-Based Molecule Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13089/) (2023)
- [SAMGPT: Text-free Graph Foundation Model for Multi-domain Pre-training and Cross-domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05424/) (2025)
- [LLMs as Zero-shot Graph Learners: Alignment of GNN Representations with LLM Token Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14512/) (2024)
- [Does GNN Pretraining Help Molecular Representation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06010/) (2022)
- [Cluster-guided Contrastive Graph Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01098/) (2023)
- [Simple Contrastive Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07865/) (2022)
- [Spectral Feature Augmentation for Graph Contrastive Learning and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01026/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Graph Contrastive Learning Based on Relation-Symmetrical Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10738/) (2022)
- [Multi-Domain Graph Foundation Models: Robust Knowledge Transfer via Topology Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02017/) (2025)
- [Generalized Graph Prompt: Toward a Unification of Pre-Training and Downstream Tasks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15317/) (2023)
- [SGL-PT: A Strong Graph Learner with Graph Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12449/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Survey of Chemical Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16484/) (2022)
- [GraphControl: Adding Conditional Control to Universal Graph Pre-trained Models for Graph Domain Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07365/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Pre-training Based on Structural Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10462/) (2022)
- [ProG: A Graph Prompt Learning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05346/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Graph Clustering: Taxonomy, Challenge, Application, and Open Resource](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12875/) (2022)
- [AdapterGNN: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Improves Generalization in GNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09595/) (2023)
- [Towards Graph Contrastive Learning: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11868/) (2024)
- [Automated Spatio-Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03920/) (2023)
- [Extracting Low-/High- Frequency Knowledge from Graph Neural Networks and Injecting it into MLPs: An Effective GNN-to-MLP Distillation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10758/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Pretraining on Graphs: Taxonomy, Methods, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07893/) (2022)
- [CONVERT:Contrastive Graph Clustering with Reliable Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08963/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has emerged as a dominant technique for graph representation learning which maximizes the mutual information between paired graph augmentations that share the same semantics. Unfortunately, it is difficult to preserve semantics well during augmentations in view of the diverse nature of graph data. Currently, data augmentations in GCL that are designed to preserve semantics broadly fall into three unsatisfactory ways. First, the augmentations can be manually picked per dataset by trial-and-errors. Second, the augmentations can be selected via cumbersome search. Third, the augmentations can be obtained by introducing expensive domain-specific knowledge as guidance. All of these limit the efficiency and more general applicability of existing GCL methods. To circumvent these crucial issues, we propose a underlineSimple framework for underlineGRAph underlineContrastive lunderlineEarning, SimGRACE for brevity, which does not require data augmentations. Specifically, we take original graph as input and GNN model with its perturbed version as two encoders to obtain two correlated views for contrast. SimGRACE is inspired by the observation that graph data can preserve their semantics well during encoder perturbations while not requiring manual trial-and-errors, cumbersome search or expensive domain knowledge for augmentations selection. Also, we explain why SimGRACE can succeed. Furthermore, we devise adversarial training scheme, dubbed AT-SimGRACE, to enhance the robustness of graph contrastive learning and theoretically explain the reasons. Albeit simple, we show that SimGRACE can yield competitive or better performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in terms of generalizability, transferability and robustness, while enjoying unprecedented degree of flexibility and efficiency.