MARIO: Model Agnostic Recipe for Improving OOD Generalization of Graph Contrastive Learning

Yun Zhu, Haizhou Shi, Zhenshuo Zhang, Siliang Tang

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization for unsupervised learning methods on graph data. To improve the robustness against such distributional shifts, we propose a Model-Agnostic Recipe for Improving OOD generalizability of unsupervised graph contrastive learning methods, which we refer to as MARIO. MARIO introduces two principles aimed at developing distributional-shift-robust graph contrastive methods to overcome the limitations of existing frameworks: (i) Invariance principle that incorporates adversarial graph augmentation to obtain invariant representations and (ii) Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for achieving generalizable representations through refining representation contrasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that investigates the OOD generalization problem of graph contrastive learning, with a specific focus on node-level tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OOD test set, while maintaining comparable performance on the in-distribution test set when compared to existing approaches. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/ZhuYun97/MARIO.