# Dink-Net: Neural Clustering on Large Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [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)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12454/) (2022)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [FastGCN: Fast Learning with Graph Convolutional Networks via Importance Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10247/) (2018)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Improves Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05485/) (2019)
- [PairNorm: Tackling Oversmoothing in GNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12223/) (2019)
- [Towards Deeper Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09296/) (2020)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [SIGN: Scalable Inception Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11198/) (2020)
- [DeeperGCN: All You Need to Train Deeper GCNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07739/) (2020)
- [Towards K-means-friendly Spaces: Simultaneous Deep Learning and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04794/) (2016)
- [Scaling Graph Neural Networks with Approximate PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01570/) (2020)
- [Training Graph Neural Networks with 1000 Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07476/) (2021)
- [Graph Clustering with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16904/) (2020)
- [Attributed Graph Clustering: A Deep Attentional Embedding Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06532/) (2019)
- [Structural Deep Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01633/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Clustering via Dual Correlation Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14772/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Federated Learning for Generalization, Robustness, Fairness: A Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06750/) (2023)
- [CONVERT:Contrastive Graph Clustering with Reliable Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08963/) (2023)
- [LSEnet: Lorentz Structural Entropy Neural Network for Deep Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11801/) (2024)
- [DealMVC: Dual Contrastive Calibration for Multi-view Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09000/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Graph Clustering with Unknown Cluster Number](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06827/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervision Improves Diffusion Models for Tabular Data Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18013/) (2024)
- [CDC: A Simple Framework for Complex Data Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03670/) (2024)
- [Cross-Contrastive Clustering for Multimodal Attributed Graphs with Dual Graph Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20030/) (2025)
- [One-step Multi-view Clustering with Diverse Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05437/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Learnable Clustering for Intent Learning in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05975/) (2024)
- [TMac: Temporal Multi-Modal Graph Learning for Acoustic Event Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11845/) (2023)
- [Scalable Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Structure Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16541/) (2023)
- [Effective Clustering on Large Attributed Bipartite Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11922/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning from Spectral Clustering Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00742/) (2024)
- [Normality Learning-based Graph Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06034/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Graph Condensation: Advancing Data Versatility through Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17063/) (2024)
- [Efficient Multi-View Graph Clustering with Local and Global Structure Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00024/) (2023)
- [THESAURUS: Contrastive Graph Clustering by Swapping Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Couplings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11550/) (2024)
- [GraphFM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08310/) (2024)
- [Pin-Tuning: Parameter-Efficient In-Context Tuning for Few-Shot Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01158/) (2024)
- [CIMAGE: Exploiting the Conditional Independence in Masked Graph Auto-encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07852/) (2025)
- [ASIL: Augmented Structural Information Learning for Deep Graph Clustering in Hyperbolic Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09970/) (2025)
- [Bridging Academia and Industry: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Attributed Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08519/) (2026)
- [KAT-Coder-V2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05471/) (2026)
- [arXiv4TGC: Large-Scale Datasets for Temporal Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04962/) (2023)
- [Why Deep Models Often cannot Beat Non-deep Counterparts on Molecular Property Prediction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17702/) (2023)
- [Multi-level Graph Subspace Contrastive Learning for Hyperspectral Image Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05211/) (2024)
- [textttSynC: Synergistic Boosting of Structure and Representation for Deep Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15797/) (2024)
- [Scalable Attribute-Missing Graph Clustering via Neighborhood Differentiation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13368/) (2025)
- [Generalized Deep Multi-view Clustering via Causal Learning with Partially Aligned Cross-view Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16022/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep graph clustering, which aims to group the nodes of a graph into disjoint clusters with deep neural networks, has achieved promising progress in recent years. However, the existing methods fail to scale to the large graph with million nodes. To solve this problem, a scalable deep graph clustering method (Dink-Net) is proposed with the idea of dilation and shrink. Firstly, by discriminating nodes, whether being corrupted by augmentations, representations are learned in a self-supervised manner. Meanwhile, the cluster centres are initialized as learnable neural parameters. Subsequently, the clustering distribution is optimized by minimizing the proposed cluster dilation loss and cluster shrink loss in an adversarial manner. By these settings, we unify the two-step clustering, i.e., representation learning and clustering optimization, into an end-to-end framework, guiding the network to learn clustering-friendly features. Besides, Dink-Net scales well to large graphs since the designed loss functions adopt the mini-batch data to optimize the clustering distribution even without performance drops. Both experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate the superiority of our method. Compared to the runner-up, Dink-Net achieves 9.62% NMI improvement on the ogbn-papers100M dataset with 111 million nodes and 1.6 billion edges. The source code is released at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Dink-Net. Besides, a collection (papers, codes, and datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering.