# Revisiting Graph Autoencoders as Implicit Contrastive Learners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10241 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10241/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Pitfalls of Graph Neural Network Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05868/) (2018)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [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)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13625/) (2019)
- [Provable Guarantees for Self-Supervised Deep Learning with Spectral Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04156/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Graph Augmentation to Improve Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05819/) (2021)
- [Are we really making much progress? Revisiting, benchmarking, and refining heterogeneous graph neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14936/) (2021)

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

- [LMAE4Eth: Generalizable and Robust Ethereum Fraud Detection by Exploring Transaction Semantics and Masked Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03939/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph autoencoders (GAEs) and graph contrastive learning (GCL) are two major paradigms for self-supervised representation learning on graphs, yet they are often studied in isolation and treated as fundamentally different approaches. In this work, we revisit GAEs through the lens of contrastive learning and show that both structure-based and feature-based GAEs can be conceptualized as implicitly graph contrastive learners. This perspective reveals that many existing GAEs differ primarily in how contrastive views are constructed, rather than in their learning objectives or architectures. Building on this insight, we introduce a unified formulation that highlights contrastive view design as a central and previously less explored dimension in GAEs. In particular, we identify asymmetric contrastive views, arising from mismatches in subgraph views, as an important yet underexplored design axis in prior GAE research. We formalize this insight within a unified framework and conduct systematic experiments on representative graph learning tasks to examine its impact on performance and efficiency. Our results show that interpreting GAEs as implicit contrastive learners offers a clearer understanding of existing models and provides practical guidance for designing effective and scalable graph autoencoders.