# Variational Graph Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07150/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Pitfalls of Graph Neural Network Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05868/) (2018)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13021/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Understanding over-squashing and bottlenecks on graphs via curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14522/) (2021)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Improves Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05485/) (2019)
- [Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09348/) (2021)
- [GPT-GNN: Generative Pre-Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15437/) (2020)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [When Does Self-Supervision Help Graph Convolutional Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09136/) (2020)
- [Multi-Stage Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Convolutional Networks on Graphs with Few Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11038/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05055/) (2023)
- [On the Trade-off between Over-smoothing and Over-squashing in Deep Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02374/) (2022)
- [Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14065/) (2022)
- [CAGNN: Cluster-Aware Graph Neural Networks for Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01674/) (2020)
- [MUSE: Multi-View Contrastive Learning for Heterophilic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16026/) (2023)
- [HYGENE: A Diffusion-based Hypergraph Generation Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16457/) (2024)
- [Generative Subgraph Contrast for Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11996/) (2022)

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

- [Probabilistic Variational Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10159/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph representation learning (GRL) is a fundamental task in machine learning, aiming to encode high-dimensional graph-structured data into low-dimensional vectors. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods are widely used in GRL because they can avoid expensive human annotation. In this work, we propose a novel Subgraph Gaussian Embedding Contrast (SGEC) method. Our approach introduces a subgraph Gaussian embedding module, which adaptively maps subgraphs to a structured Gaussian space, ensuring the preservation of graph characteristics while controlling the distribution of generated subgraphs. We employ optimal transport distances, including Wasserstein and Gromov-Wasserstein distances, to effectively measure the similarity between subgraphs, enhancing the robustness of the contrastive learning process. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SGEC outperforms or presents competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches. Our findings provide insights into the design of SSL methods for GRL, emphasizing the importance of the distribution of the generated contrastive pairs.