# Localized Contrastive Learning on Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04604 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04604/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [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)
- [On Variational Bounds of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06922/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01028/) (2020)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [Random Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02143/) (2021)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [Provable Guarantees for Self-Supervised Deep Learning with Spectral Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04156/) (2021)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [Graph Representation Learning via Graphical Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01169/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Simple and Asymmetric Graph Contrastive Learning without Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18884/) (2023)
- [One Prompt Fits All: Universal Graph Adaptation for Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22416/) (2025)
- [Self-Pro: A Self-Prompt and Tuning Framework for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10362/) (2023)
- [Node Embeddings via Neighbor Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23822/) (2025)
- [Why Does Graph Learning Fail to Fully Benefit from a Text Teacher?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25741/) (2026)
- [Simple Graph Contrastive Learning via Fractional-order Neural Diffusion Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16748/) (2025)
- [Negative Metric Learning for Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10307/) (2025)
- [Fractal Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11356/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Multi-view Graph Contrastive Learning via Fractional-order Neural Diffusion Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06216/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Positive Samples in Graph Contrastive Learning: From the Perspective of Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10284/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning methods based on InfoNCE loss are popular in node representation learning tasks on graph-structured data. However, its reliance on data augmentation and its quadratic computational complexity might lead to inconsistency and inefficiency problems. To mitigate these limitations, in this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective contrastive model named Localized Graph Contrastive Learning (Local-GCL in short). Local-GCL consists of two key designs: 1) We fabricate the positive examples for each node directly using its first-order neighbors, which frees our method from the reliance on carefully-designed graph augmentations; 2) To improve the efficiency of contrastive learning on graphs, we devise a kernelized contrastive loss, which could be approximately computed in linear time and space complexity with respect to the graph size. We provide theoretical analysis to justify the effectiveness and rationality of the proposed methods. Experiments on various datasets with different scales and properties demonstrate that in spite of its simplicity, Local-GCL achieves quite competitive performance in self-supervised node representation learning tasks on graphs with various scales and properties.