# Generative and Contrastive Graph Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11776 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11776/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (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)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [GPT-GNN: Generative Pre-Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15437/) (2020)
- [GraphMAE2: A Decoding-Enhanced Masked Self-Supervised Graph Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04779/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Graph Encoder for Attributed Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01594/) (2020)
- [What's Behind the Mask: Understanding Masked Graph Modeling for Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10053/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05923/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Graph Neural Networks without explicit negative sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14958/) (2021)
- [GiGaMAE: Generalizable Graph Masked Autoencoder via Collaborative Latent Space Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09663/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning (SSL) on graphs generates node and graph representations (i.e., embeddings) that can be used for downstream tasks such as node classification, node clustering, and link prediction. Graph SSL is particularly useful in scenarios with limited or no labeled data. Existing SSL methods predominantly follow contrastive or generative paradigms, each excelling in different tasks: contrastive methods typically perform well on classification tasks, while generative methods often excel in link prediction. In this paper, we present a novel architecture for graph SSL that integrates the strengths of both approaches. Our framework introduces community-aware node-level contrastive learning, providing more robust and effective positive and negative node pairs generation, alongside graph-level contrastive learning to capture global semantic information. Additionally, we employ a comprehensive augmentation strategy that combines feature masking, node perturbation, and edge perturbation, enabling robust and diverse representation learning. By incorporating these enhancements, our model achieves superior performance across multiple tasks, including node classification, clustering, and link prediction. Evaluations on open benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a performance lift of 0.23%-2.01% depending on the task and dataset.