# Combating Bilateral Edge Noise for Robust Link Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [RotatE: Knowledge Graph Embedding by Relational Rotation in Complex Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10197/) (2019)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks for Graph Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07984/) (2018)
- [Neural Bellman-Ford Networks: A General Graph Neural Network Framework for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06935/) (2021)
- [Graph Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12811/) (2020)
- [Peer Loss Functions: Learning from Noisy Labels without Knowing Noise Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03231/) (2019)
- [Learning to Drop: Robust Graph Neural Network via Topological Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07057/) (2020)
- [Graph Information Bottleneck for Subgraph Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05563/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks: Privacy, Robustness, Fairness, and Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08570/) (2022)
- [Out-Of-Distribution Generalization on Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07987/) (2022)
- [The Rise of Social Bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.5225/) (2014)
- [Graph Structure Learning with Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08903/) (2021)
- [NRGNN: Learning a Label Noise-Resistant Graph Neural Network on Sparsely and Noisily Labeled Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04714/) (2021)
- [Understanding Negative Sampling in Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09863/) (2020)
- [Understanding and Improving Graph Injection Attack by Promoting Unnoticeability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08057/) (2022)
- [A*Net: A Scalable Path-based Reasoning Approach for Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04798/) (2022)
- [Bringing Your Own View: Graph Contrastive Learning without Prefabricated Data Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01702/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Out-of-distribution Detection Learning with Unreliable Out-of-distribution Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03236/) (2023)
- [From Passive to Active Reasoning: Can Large Language Models Ask the Right Questions under Incomplete Information?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08295/) (2025)
- [Detecting Machine-Generated Texts by Multi-Population Aware Optimization for Maximum Mean Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16041/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the impact of noisy labels in graph classification: A utility and privacy perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07314/) (2024)
- [Is the Information Bottleneck Robust Enough? Towards Label-Noise Resistant Information Bottleneck Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10573/) (2025)
- [Graph-based Active Learning for Entity Cluster Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14992/) (2024)
- [Training Robust Graph Neural Networks by Modeling Noise Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19670/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Contrastive Link Prediction With Edge Balancing Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14808/) (2025)
- [A Survey on GNN-based Link Prediction: Techniques, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16198/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although link prediction on graphs has achieved great success with the development of graph neural networks (GNNs), the potential robustness under the edge noise is still less investigated. To close this gap, we first conduct an empirical study to disclose that the edge noise bilaterally perturbs both input topology and target label, yielding severe performance degradation and representation collapse. To address this dilemma, we propose an information-theory-guided principle, Robust Graph Information Bottleneck (RGIB), to extract reliable supervision signals and avoid representation collapse. Different from the basic information bottleneck, RGIB further decouples and balances the mutual dependence among graph topology, target labels, and representation, building new learning objectives for robust representation against the bilateral noise. Two instantiations, RGIB-SSL and RGIB-REP, are explored to leverage the merits of different methodologies, i.e., self-supervised learning and data reparameterization, for implicit and explicit data denoising, respectively. Extensive experiments on six datasets and three GNNs with diverse noisy scenarios verify the effectiveness of our RGIB instantiations. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/RGIB.