# SAILOR: Structural Augmentation Based Tail Node Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06801 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06801/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs with Jumping Knowledge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03536/) (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)
- [Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07988/) (2020)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [Graph Structure Learning for Robust Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10203/) (2020)
- [Wiki-CS: A Wikipedia-Based Benchmark for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02901/) (2020)
- [Data Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06830/) (2020)
- [Data Augmentation for Deep Graph Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08235/) (2022)
- [AM-GCN: Adaptive Multi-channel Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02265/) (2020)
- [DEMO-Net: Degree-specific Graph Neural Networks for Node and Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02319/) (2019)
- [Cold Brew: Distilling Graph Node Representations with Incomplete or Missing Neighborhoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04840/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Adversarial Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05730/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Attack on Large Scale Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03488/) (2020)
- [Uncovering the Structural Fairness in Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03011/) (2022)
- [CrossCBR: Cross-view Contrastive Learning for Bundle Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00242/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Revisiting Graph Contrastive Learning on Anomaly Detection: A Structural Imbalance Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14677/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Benchmark on Spectral GNNs: The Impact on Efficiency, Memory, and Effectiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09675/) (2024)
- [Node Duplication Improves Cold-start Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09711/) (2024)
- [Theoretical and Empirical Insights into the Origins of Degree Bias in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03139/) (2024)
- [ASAP: Unsupervised Post-training with Label Distribution Shift Adaptive Learning Rate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13445/) (2025)
- [OASIS: Open-world Adaptive Self-supervised and Imbalanced-aware System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16656/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in representation learning for graphs recently. However, the effectiveness of GNNs, which capitalize on the key operation of message propagation, highly depends on the quality of the topology structure. Most of the graphs in real-world scenarios follow a long-tailed distribution on their node degrees, that is, a vast majority of the nodes in the graph are tail nodes with only a few connected edges. GNNs produce inferior node representations for tail nodes since they lack structural information. In the pursuit of promoting the expressiveness of GNNs for tail nodes, we explore how the deficiency of structural information deteriorates the performance of tail nodes and propose a general Structural Augmentation based taIL nOde Representation learning framework, dubbed as SAILOR, which can jointly learn to augment the graph structure and extract more informative representations for tail nodes. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAILOR can significantly improve the tail node representations and outperform the state-of-the-art baselines.