# Simple and Asymmetric Graph Contrastive Learning without Augmentations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18884 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18884/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07988/) (2020)
- [LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03578/) (2015)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [A Theoretical Analysis of Contrastive Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09229/) (2019)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05584/) (2017)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [A critical look at the evaluation of GNNs under heterophily: Are we really making progress?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11640/) (2023)
- [Provable Guarantees for Self-Supervised Deep Learning with Spectral Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04156/) (2021)
- [Large Scale Learning on Non-Homophilous Graphs: New Benchmarks and Strong Simple Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14446/) (2021)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [Network Embedding as Matrix Factorization: Unifying DeepWalk, LINE, PTE, and node2vec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02971/) (2017)
- [Large-Scale Representation Learning on Graphs via Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06514/) (2021)
- [Is Homophily a Necessity for Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06134/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Graphs with Heterophily: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07082/) (2022)

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

- [Non-Homophilic Graph Pre-Training and Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12594/) (2024)
- [The Heterophilic Graph Learning Handbook: Benchmarks, Models, Theoretical Analysis, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09618/) (2024)
- [How to Leverage Demonstration Data in Alignment for Large Language Model? A Self-Imitation Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10093/) (2024)
- [GRAVER: Generative Graph Vocabularies for Robust Graph Foundation Models Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05592/) (2025)
- [3M-Diffusion: Latent Multi-Modal Diffusion for Language-Guided Molecular Structure Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07179/) (2024)
- [Training MLPs on Graphs without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03864/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Graph Contrastive Learning through Relative Similarity Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05533/) (2025)
- [Structure-Centric Graph Foundation Model via Geometric Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08689/) (2026)
- [Discrepancy-Aware Graph Mask Auto-Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19343/) (2025)
- [Str-GCL: Structural Commonsense Driven Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07141/) (2025)
- [Learning Graph Foundation Models on Riemannian Graph-of-Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09993/) (2026)
- [Preventing Collapse in Contrastive Learning with Orthonormal Prototypes (CLOP)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18699/) (2024)
- [Iter-AHMCL: Alleviate Hallucination for Large Language Model via Iterative Model-level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12130/) (2024)
- [GeomCLIP: Contrastive Geometry-Text Pre-training for Molecules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10821/) (2024)
- [MIN: Multi-channel Interaction Network for Drug-Target Interaction with Protein Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07778/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Homophily-Heterophily Separation: Relation-Aware Learning in Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20980/) (2025)
- [CueGCL: Cluster-aware Personalized Self-Training for Unsupervised Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11073/) (2023)
- [Disentangled Generative Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13471/) (2024)
- [Explanation-Preserving Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12657/) (2024)
- [HGCL: Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for User-Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19020/) (2025)
- [Surprisingly Simple and Effective Multi-Domain Graph Foundation Model through Graph-to-Table Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11374/) (2026)
- [SCGFM-ART: Amortized Relational Transport for Structure-Centric Graph Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20419/) (2026)
- [SimMLP: Training MLPs on Graphs without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08918/) (2024)
- [FairACE: Achieving Degree Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Contrastive and Adversarial Group-Balanced Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09210/) (2025)
- [H3GNNs: Harmonizing Heterophily and Homophily in GNNs via Joint Structural Node Encoding and Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11699/) (2025)
- [Simple Graph Contrastive Learning via Fractional-order Neural Diffusion Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16748/) (2025)
- [Aligning the Spectrum: Hybrid Graph Pre-training and Prompt Tuning across Homophily and Heterophily](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11328/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Contrastive Link Prediction With Edge Balancing Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14808/) (2025)
- [Enhanced Pre-training of Graph Neural Networks for Million-Scale Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12401/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Graph Mixture of Residual Experts: Unsupervised Learning on Diverse Graphs with Heterogeneous Specialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21207/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has shown superior performance in representation learning in graph-structured data. Despite their success, most existing GCL methods rely on prefabricated graph augmentation and homophily assumptions. Thus, they fail to generalize well to heterophilic graphs where connected nodes may have different class labels and dissimilar features. In this paper, we study the problem of conducting contrastive learning on homophilic and heterophilic graphs. We find that we can achieve promising performance simply by considering an asymmetric view of the neighboring nodes. The resulting simple algorithm, Asymmetric Contrastive Learning for Graphs (GraphACL), is easy to implement and does not rely on graph augmentations and homophily assumptions. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that GraphACL can capture one-hop local neighborhood information and two-hop monophily similarity, which are both important for modeling heterophilic graphs. Experimental results show that the simple GraphACL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art graph contrastive learning and self-supervised learning methods on homophilic and heterophilic graphs. The code of GraphACL is available at https://github.com/tengxiao1/GraphACL.