# Refining Latent Representations: A Generative SSL Approach for Heterogeneous Graph Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11102/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03578/) (2015)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (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)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [MAGNN: Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network for Heterogeneous Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01680/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning Automated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07594/) (2021)
- [Are we really making much progress? Revisiting, benchmarking, and refining heterogeneous graph neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14936/) (2021)
- [Variational Autoencoder for Deep Learning of Images, Labels and Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08976/) (2016)
- [Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10730/) (2017)
- [GraphMAE2: A Decoding-Enhanced Masked Self-Supervised Graph Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04779/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Heterogeneous Graph Embedding: Methods, Techniques, Applications and Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14867/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Heterogeneous Information Network Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04854/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Attributed Multiplex Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06750/) (2019)
- [ProGCL: Rethinking Hard Negative Mining in Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02027/) (2021)
- [Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02547/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Preserving Node Distinctness in Graph Autoencoders via Similarity Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17517/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has shown significant potential and has garnered increasing interest in graph learning. However, particularly for generative SSL methods, its potential in Heterogeneous Graph Learning (HGL) remains relatively underexplored. Generative SSL utilizes an encoder to map the input graph into a latent representation and a decoder to recover the input graph from the latent representation. Previous HGL SSL methods generally design complex strategies to capture graph heterogeneity, which heavily rely on contrastive view construction strategies that are often non-trivial. Yet, refining the latent representation in generative SSL can effectively improve graph learning results. In this study, we propose HGVAE, a generative SSL method specially designed for HGL. Instead of focusing on designing complex strategies to capture heterogeneity, HGVAE centers on refining the latent representation. Specifically, HGVAE innovatively develops a contrastive task based on the latent representation. To ensure the hardness of negative samples, we develop a progressive negative sample generation (PNSG) mechanism that leverages the ability of Variational Inference (VI) to generate high-quality negative samples. As a pioneer in applying generative SSL for HGL, HGVAE refines the latent representation, thereby compelling the model to learn high-quality representations. Compared with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, HGVAE achieves impressive results, thus validating its superiority.