# I'm Me, We're Us, and I'm Us: Tri-directional Contrastive Learning on Hypergraphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Hypergraph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09401/) (2018)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05584/) (2017)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13625/) (2019)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [A Survey on Hypergraph Neural Networks: An In-Depth and Step-By-Step Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01039/) (2024)
- [HypeBoy: Generative Self-Supervised Representation Learning on Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00638/) (2024)
- [Data Augmentation on Graphs: A Technical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09970/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Self-Supervised Graph Foundation Models: Knowledge-Based Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16137/) (2024)
- [Hypergraph Self-supervised Learning with Sampling-efficient Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11825/) (2024)
- [Hypergraph Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01203/) (2025)
- [CHGNN: A Semi-Supervised Contrastive Hypergraph Learning Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06213/) (2023)
- [HypeMed: Enhancing Medication Recommendations with Hypergraph-Based Patient Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18459/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Hyperedge Prediction with Context-Aware Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05798/) (2023)
- [Expressive Higher-Order Link Prediction through Hypergraph Symmetry Breaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11339/) (2024)
- [Generalization Performance of Hypergraph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12554/) (2025)
- [HiTeC: Hierarchical Contrastive Learning on Text-Attributed Hypergraph with Semantic-Aware Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03104/) (2025)
- [BHyGNN+: Unsupervised Representation Learning for Heterophilic Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14919/) (2026)
- [Hypergraph clustering using Ricci curvature: an edge transport perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15695/) (2024)
- [Parameter-Free Hypergraph Neural Network for Few-Shot Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21462/) (2025)
- [Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for both Homophilic and Heterophilic Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18783/) (2025)
- [From Representation to Clusters: A Contrastive Learning Approach for Attributed Hypergraph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09370/) (2026)
- [Enhanced Atrial Fibrillation Prediction in ESUS Patients with Hypergraph-based Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13297/) (2026)
- [TAHB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Text-Attributed Hypergraph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15055/) (2026)
- [α-Graph: Attention-Infused Normalizing Flow Approach to Tractable Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07961/) (2026)
- [HyperFuse: Fast Self-Supervised Node Embeddings for Attributed Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03211/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although machine learning on hypergraphs has attracted considerable attention, most of the works have focused on (semi-)supervised learning, which may cause heavy labeling costs and poor generalization. Recently, contrastive learning has emerged as a successful unsupervised representation learning method. Despite the prosperous development of contrastive learning in other domains, contrastive learning on hypergraphs remains little explored. In this paper, we propose TriCL (Tri-directional Contrastive Learning), a general framework for contrastive learning on hypergraphs. Its main idea is tri-directional contrast, and specifically, it aims to maximize in two augmented views the agreement (a) between the same node, (b) between the same group of nodes, and (c) between each group and its members. Together with simple but surprisingly effective data augmentation and negative sampling schemes, these three forms of contrast enable TriCL to capture both microscopic and mesoscopic structural information in node embeddings. Our extensive experiments using 13 baseline approaches, five datasets, and two tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of TriCL, and most noticeably, TriCL consistently outperforms not just unsupervised competitors but also (semi-)supervised competitors mostly by significant margins for node classification. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/wooner49/TriCL.