# Toward General Digraph Contrastive Learning: A Dual Spatial Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16311/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs with Jumping Knowledge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03536/) (2018)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (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)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02260/) (2020)
- [Deep Gaussian Embedding of Graphs: Unsupervised Inductive Learning via Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03815/) (2017)
- [Wiki-CS: A Wikipedia-Based Benchmark for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02901/) (2020)
- [Graph neural networks for materials science and chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09481/) (2022)
- [SimGRACE: A Simple Framework for Graph Contrastive Learning without Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03104/) (2022)
- [MagNet: A Neural Network for Directed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11391/) (2021)
- [Sub-graph Contrast for Scalable Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10273/) (2020)
- [Edge Directionality Improves Learning on Heterophilic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10498/) (2023)
- [Graph Attention Multi-Layer Perceptron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04355/) (2022)
- [Directed Graph Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13970/) (2020)
- [Transformers Meet Directed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00049/) (2023)
- [Towards Graph Contrastive Learning: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11868/) (2024)
- [RAW-GNN: RAndom Walk Aggregation based Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13953/) (2022)
- [Breaking the Entanglement of Homophily and Heterophily in Semi-supervised Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04111/) (2023)
- [LightDiC: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Large-scale Digraph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11772/) (2024)
- [D-HYPR: Harnessing Neighborhood Modeling and Asymmetry Preservation for Digraph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11734/) (2021)

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

- [ChemHyperMag: Physics-informed magnetic hypergraph learning improves molecular ADMET prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18332/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting consistent representations from graphs, independent of labeled information. However, existing methods predominantly focus on undirected graphs, disregarding the pivotal directional information that is fundamental and indispensable in real-world networks (e.g., social networks and recommendations).In this paper, we introduce S2-DiGCL, a novel framework that emphasizes spatial insights from complex and real domain perspectives for directed graph (digraph) contrastive learning. From the complex-domain perspective, S2-DiGCL introduces personalized perturbations into the magnetic Laplacian to adaptively modulate edge phases and directional semantics. From the real-domain perspective, it employs a path-based subgraph augmentation strategy to capture fine-grained local asymmetries and topological dependencies. By jointly leveraging these two complementary spatial views, S2-DiGCL constructs high-quality positive and negative samples, leading to more general and robust digraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on 7 real-world digraph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving SOTA performance with 4.41% improvement in node classification and 4.34% in link prediction under both supervised and unsupervised settings.