# SOLA-GCL: Subgraph-Oriented Learnable Augmentation Method for Graph Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10100 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10100/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [TUDataset: A collection of benchmark datasets for learning with graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08663/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning Automated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07594/) (2021)
- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Graph Augmentation to Improve Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05819/) (2021)
- [SimGRACE: A Simple Framework for Graph Contrastive Learning without Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03104/) (2022)
- [Sub-graph Contrast for Scalable Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10273/) (2020)
- [Emerging Drug Interaction Prediction Enabled by Flow-based Graph Neural Network with Biomedical Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09261/) (2023)
- [Cross-Domain Few-Shot Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08265/) (2022)
- [Learning Graph Augmentations to Learn Graph Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09830/) (2022)
- [Multi-View Graph Representation Learning Beyond Homophily](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07509/) (2023)
- [An Effective and Efficient Time-aware Entity Alignment Framework via Two-aspect Three-view Label Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06013/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer with Curriculum Learning for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14698/) (2025)
- [Robust Contrastive Graph Clustering with Adaptive Local-Global Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28209/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful technique for learning graph representations that are robust and discriminative. However, traditional approaches often neglect the critical role of subgraph structures, particularly the intra-subgraph characteristics and inter-subgraph relationships, which are crucial for generating informative and diverse contrastive pairs. These subgraph features are crucial as they vary significantly across different graph types, such as social networks where they represent communities, and biochemical networks where they symbolize molecular interactions. To address this issue, our work proposes a novel subgraph-oriented learnable augmentation method for graph contrastive learning, termed SOLA-GCL, that centers around subgraphs, taking full advantage of the subgraph information for data augmentation. Specifically, SOLA-GCL initially partitions a graph into multiple densely connected subgraphs based on their intrinsic properties. To preserve and enhance the unique characteristics inherent to subgraphs, a graph view generator optimizes augmentation strategies for each subgraph, thereby generating tailored views for graph contrastive learning. This generator uses a combination of intra-subgraph and inter-subgraph augmentation strategies, including node dropping, feature masking, intra-edge perturbation, inter-edge perturbation, and subgraph swapping. Extensive experiments have been conducted on various graph learning applications, ranging from social networks to molecules, under semi-supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and transfer learning settings to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over the state-of-the-art in GCL.