# Generating Counterfactual Hard Negative Samples for Graph Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.00148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [TUDataset: A collection of benchmark datasets for learning with graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08663/) (2020)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (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)
- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Graph Trend Filtering Networks for Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05552/) (2021)
- [Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05470/) (2021)
- [Faster Kernels for Graphs with Continuous Attributes via Hashing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00064/) (2016)
- [Dual Space Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07409/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Robust image representations with counterfactual contrastive learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10365/) (2024)
- [Counterfactual contrastive learning: robust representations via causal image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09605/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Self-Supervised Graph Foundation Models: Knowledge-Based Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16137/) (2024)
- [When Graph Neural Network Meets Causality: Opportunities, Methodologies and An Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12477/) (2023)
- [From Overfitting to Robustness: Quantity, Quality, and Variety Oriented Negative Sample Selection in Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15044/) (2024)
- [LATEX-GCL: Large Language Models (LLMs)-Based Data Augmentation for Text-Attributed Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01145/) (2024)
- [All in One: Multi-Task Prompting for Graph Neural Networks (Extended Abstract)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07040/) (2024)
- [Motif-Consistent Counterfactuals with Adversarial Refinement for Graph-Level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13251/) (2024)
- [Mitigating the Performance Sacrifice in DP-Satisfied Federated Settings through Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11836/) (2022)
- [Graph Self-Contrast Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02304/) (2023)
- [AC2L-GAD: Active Counterfactual Contrastive Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21171/) (2026)
- [Imbalanced Graph-Level Anomaly Detection via Counterfactual Augmentation and Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11082/) (2024)
- [AdNGCL: Adaptive Negative Scheduling for Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03076/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful tool for unsupervised graph representation learning. The key to the success of graph contrastive learning is to acquire high-quality positive and negative samples as contrasting pairs for the purpose of learning underlying structural semantics of the input graph. Recent works usually sample negative samples from the same training batch with the positive samples, or from an external irrelevant graph. However, a significant limitation lies in such strategies, which is the unavoidable problem of sampling false negative samples. In this paper, we propose a novel method to utilize Counterfactual mechanism to generate artificial hard negative samples for Graph Contrastive learning, namely CGC, which has a different perspective compared to those sampling-based strategies. We utilize counterfactual mechanism to produce hard negative samples, which ensures that the generated samples are similar to, but have labels that different from the positive sample. The proposed method achieves satisfying results on several datasets compared to some traditional unsupervised graph learning methods and some SOTA graph contrastive learning methods. We also conduct some supplementary experiments to give an extensive illustration of the proposed method, including the performances of CGC with different hard negative samples and evaluations for hard negative samples generated with different similarity measurements.