Spectrum Guided Topology Augmentation for Graph Contrastive Learning

Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen, Hongning Wang

Keywords: graph contrastive learning, graph spectral theory, graph augmentation

Abstract: Graph contrastive learning (GCL) is a major self-supervised graph learning technique that aims to capture invariant properties of graphs via instance discrimination. Its performance heavily relies on the construction of multiple graph views yet it still remains unclear about what makes effective topology augmentations. Recent studies mainly perform topology augmentations in a uniformly random manner without considering graph properties. In this work, we aim to find principled ways for topology augmentations by exploring the invariance of graphs from the graph spectral perspective. Specifically, we propose a novel topology augmentation method guided by spectral change. Extensive experiments on both graph and node classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in capturing the structural essence of graphs for self-supervised learning. The proposed method also brings promising performance in transfer learning and adversarial attack settings. We envision this work to provide a principled way for graph augmentation.