# ARIEL: Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06956 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06956/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Convex optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01946/) (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)
- [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)
- [Pitfalls of Graph Neural Network Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05868/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks for Graph Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07984/) (2018)
- [Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09348/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08412/) (2019)
- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Graph Representation Learning via Graphical Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01169/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PyG-SSL: A Graph Self-Supervised Learning Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21151/) (2024)
- [Can Graph Neural Networks Learn Language with Extremely Weak Text Supervision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08174/) (2024)
- [VGFL-SA: Vertical Graph Federated Learning Structure Attack Based on Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16793/) (2025)
- [Dual Adversarial Perturbators Generate rich Views for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06719/) (2024)
- [ASPECT: Node-Level Adaptive Spectral Fusion for Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01878/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning is an effective unsupervised method in graph representation learning, and the key component of contrastive learning lies in the construction of positive and negative samples. Previous methods usually utilize the proximity of nodes in the graph as the principle. Recently, the data-augmentation-based contrastive learning method has advanced to show great power in the visual domain, and some works extended this method from images to graphs. However, unlike the data augmentation on images, the data augmentation on graphs is far less intuitive and much harder to provide high-quality contrastive samples, which leaves much space for improvement. In this work, by introducing an adversarial graph view for data augmentation, we propose a simple but effective method, Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning (ARIEL), to extract informative contrastive samples within reasonable constraints. We develop a new technique called information regularization for stable training and use subgraph sampling for scalability. We generalize our method from node-level contrastive learning to the graph level by treating each graph instance as a super-node. ARIEL consistently outperforms the current graph contrastive learning methods for both node-level and graph-level classification tasks on real-world datasets. We further demonstrate that ARIEL is more robust in the face of adversarial attacks.