# Graph Contrastive Learning with Implicit Augmentations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03710 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03710/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00670/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [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)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [Conditional Neural Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01613/) (2018)
- [GemNet: Universal Directional Graph Neural Networks for Molecules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08903/) (2021)
- [Neural Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01622/) (2018)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning Automated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07594/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Graph Neural Networks: A Unified Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10757/) (2021)
- [Towards Visually Explaining Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07389/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Knowledge Graph Contrastive Learning Based on Relation-Symmetrical Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10738/) (2022)
- [Negative-Free Self-Supervised Gaussian Embedding of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01157/) (2024)
- [From Overfitting to Robustness: Quantity, Quality, and Variety Oriented Negative Sample Selection in Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15044/) (2024)
- [VGFL-SA: Vertical Graph Federated Learning Structure Attack Based on Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16793/) (2025)
- [Node-based Knowledge Graph Contrastive Learning for Medical Relationship Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10138/) (2023)
- [Dual-perspective Cross Contrastive Learning in Graph Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00403/) (2024)
- [AdNGCL: Adaptive Negative Scheduling for Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03076/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing graph contrastive learning methods rely on augmentation techniques based on random perturbations (e.g., randomly adding or dropping edges and nodes). Nevertheless, altering certain edges or nodes can unexpectedly change the graph characteristics, and choosing the optimal perturbing ratio for each dataset requires onerous manual tuning. In this paper, we introduce Implicit Graph Contrastive Learning (iGCL), which utilizes augmentations in the latent space learned from a Variational Graph Auto-Encoder by reconstructing graph topological structure. Importantly, instead of explicitly sampling augmentations from latent distributions, we further propose an upper bound for the expected contrastive loss to improve the efficiency of our learning algorithm. Thus, graph semantics can be preserved within the augmentations in an intelligent way without arbitrary manual design or prior human knowledge. Experimental results on both graph-level and node-level tasks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other benchmarks, where ablation studies in the end demonstrate the effectiveness of modules in iGCL.