# Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08792 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08792/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [MINE: Mutual Information Neural Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04062/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (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)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [Deep Convolutional Networks on Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05163/) (2015)
- [Graph Representation Learning via Graphical Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01169/) (2020)
- [Large-Scale Representation Learning on Graphs via Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06514/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks via Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00113/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10083/) (2022)
- [Towards Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06367/) (2022)
- [Sub-graph Contrast for Scalable Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10273/) (2020)
- [Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks: Aspects, Methods and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07424/) (2022)
- [Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Dynamic Graph Neural ODEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08408/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14065/) (2022)
- [GOOD-D: On Unsupervised Graph Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04208/) (2022)
- [Dink-Net: Neural Clustering on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18405/) (2023)
- [Learning Strong Graph Neural Networks with Weak Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18457/) (2023)
- [Finding the Missing-half: Graph Complementary Learning for Homophily-prone and Heterophily-prone Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07608/) (2023)
- [PREM: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Node-Level Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11676/) (2023)
- [A Label-Free Heterophily-Guided Approach for Unsupervised Graph Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13308/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Graph Unlearning: A General and Efficient Post-Processing Method via Gradient Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14407/) (2024)
- [Dual Intent Enhanced Graph Neural Network for Session-based New Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05848/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Learnable Clustering for Intent Learning in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05975/) (2024)
- [CVTGAD: Simplified Transformer with Cross-View Attention for Unsupervised Graph-level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02359/) (2024)
- [Structural Entropy Guided Unsupervised Graph Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03241/) (2025)
- [Str-GCL: Structural Commonsense Driven Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07141/) (2025)
- [Single-Node Trigger Backdoor Attacks in Graph-Based Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08401/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has recently emerged as an effective learning paradigm to alleviate the reliance on labelling information for graph representation learning. The core of GCL is to maximise the mutual information between the representation of a node and its contextual representation (i.e., the corresponding instance with similar semantic information) summarised from the contextual scope (e.g., the whole graph or 1-hop neighbourhood). This scheme distils valuable self-supervision signals for GCL training. However, existing GCL methods still suffer from limitations, such as the incapacity or inconvenience in choosing a suitable contextual scope for different datasets and building biased contrastiveness. To address aforementioned problems, we present a simple self-supervised learning method termed Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes (UGCL for short). Our algorithm builds flexible contextual representations with tunable contextual scopes by controlling the power of an adjacency matrix. Additionally, our method ensures contrastiveness is built within connected components to reduce the bias of contextual representations. Based on representations from both local and contextual scopes, UGCL optimises a very simple contrastive loss function for graph representation learning. Essentially, the architecture of UGCL can be considered as a general framework to unify existing GCL methods. We have conducted intensive experiments and achieved new state-of-the-art performance in six out of eight benchmark datasets compared with self-supervised graph representation learning baselines. Our code has been open-sourced.