FastGCL: Fast Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs via Contrastive Neighborhood Aggregation

Graph contrastive learning (GCL), as a popular approach to graph self-supervised learning, has recently achieved a non-negligible effect. To achieve superior performance, the majority of existing GCL methods elaborate on graph data augmentation to construct appropriate contrastive pairs. However, existing methods place more emphasis on the complex graph data augmentation which requires extra time overhead, and pay less attention to developing contrastive schemes specific to encoder characteristics. We argue that a better contrastive scheme should be tailored to the characteristics of graph neural networks (e.g., neighborhood aggregation) and propose a simple yet effective method named FastGCL. Specifically, by constructing weighted-aggregated and non-aggregated neighborhood information as positive and negative samples respectively, FastGCL identifies the potential semantic information of data without disturbing the graph topology and node attributes, resulting in faster training and convergence speeds. Extensive experiments have been conducted on node classification and graph classification tasks, showing that FastGCL has competitive classification performance and significant training speedup compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.