# Node Duplication Improves Cold-start Link Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [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)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06357/) (2016)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs with Jumping Knowledge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03536/) (2018)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10740/) (2020)
- [Composition-based Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03082/) (2019)
- [Towards Understanding Ensemble, Knowledge Distillation and Self-Distillation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09816/) (2020)
- [PairNorm: Tackling Oversmoothing in GNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12223/) (2019)
- [Equalization Loss for Long-Tailed Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05176/) (2020)
- [Neural Bellman-Ford Networks: A General Graph Neural Network Framework for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06935/) (2021)
- [Long-Tailed Classification by Keeping the Good and Removing the Bad Momentum Causal Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12991/) (2020)
- [Graph Random Neural Network for Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11079/) (2020)
- [Data Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06830/) (2020)
- [Hyperspherical Variational Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00891/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [GiGL: Large-Scale Graph Neural Networks at Snapchat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15054/) (2025)
- [How Does Message Passing Improve Collaborative Filtering?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08660/) (2024)
- [Diffusion on Graph: Augmentation of Graph Structure for Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12563/) (2025)
- [Graph-Assisted Culturally Adaptable Idiomatic Translation for Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21937/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are prominent in graph machine learning and have shown state-of-the-art performance in Link Prediction (LP) tasks. Nonetheless, recent studies show that GNNs struggle to produce good results on low-degree nodes despite their overall strong performance. In practical applications of LP, like recommendation systems, improving performance on low-degree nodes is critical, as it amounts to tackling the cold-start problem of improving the experiences of users with few observed interactions. In this paper, we investigate improving GNNs' LP performance on low-degree nodes while preserving their performance on high-degree nodes and propose a simple yet surprisingly effective augmentation technique called NodeDup. Specifically, NodeDup duplicates low-degree nodes and creates links between nodes and their own duplicates before following the standard supervised LP training scheme. By leveraging a ''multi-view'' perspective for low-degree nodes, NodeDup shows significant LP performance improvements on low-degree nodes without compromising any performance on high-degree nodes. Additionally, as a plug-and-play augmentation module, NodeDup can be easily applied to existing GNNs with very light computational cost. Extensive experiments show that NodeDup achieves 38.49%, 13.34%, and 6.76% improvements on isolated, low-degree, and warm nodes, respectively, on average across all datasets compared to GNNs and state-of-the-art cold-start methods.