# HGOT: Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Optimal Transport

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02619/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [MAGNN: Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network for Heterogeneous Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01680/) (2020)
- [Optimal Transport for structured data with application on graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09114/) (2018)
- [Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10730/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Co-contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09111/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Heterogeneous Graph Embedding: Methods, Techniques, Applications and Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14867/) (2020)
- [Scalable Gromov-Wasserstein Learning for Graph Partitioning and Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07645/) (2019)
- [Unifying Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and Label Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06755/) (2020)
- [Symmetric Graph Convolutional Autoencoder for Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02441/) (2019)
- [Knowledge-Preserving Incremental Social Event Detection via Heterogeneous GNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08747/) (2021)
- [Modeling Heterogeneous Hierarchies with Relation-specific Hyperbolic Cones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14923/) (2021)
- [RecipeRec: A Heterogeneous Graph Learning Model for Recipe Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14005/) (2022)
- [SelfGNN: Self-Supervised Graph Neural Networks for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20878/) (2024)
- [GTC: GNN-Transformer Co-contrastive Learning for Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15520/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs), have demonstrated excellent capabilities in processing heterogeneous information networks. Self-supervised learning on heterogeneous graphs, especially contrastive self-supervised strategy, shows great potential when there are no labels. However, this approach requires the use of carefully designed graph augmentation strategies and the selection of positive and negative samples. Determining the exact level of similarity between sample pairs is non-trivial.To solve this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised Heterogeneous graph neural network with Optimal Transport (HGOT) method which is designed to facilitate self-supervised learning for heterogeneous graphs without graph augmentation strategies. Different from traditional contrastive self-supervised learning, HGOT employs the optimal transport mechanism to relieve the laborious sampling process of positive and negative samples. Specifically, we design an aggregating view (central view) to integrate the semantic information contained in the views represented by different meta-paths (branch views). Then, we introduce an optimal transport plan to identify the transport relationship between the semantics contained in the branch view and the central view. This allows the optimal transport plan between graphs to align with the representations, forcing the encoder to learn node representations that are more similar to the graph space and of higher quality. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed HGOT model can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks. In particular, in the node classification task, HGOT achieves an average of more than 6% improvement in accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods.