AAANE: Attention-Based Adversarial Autoencoder for Multi-scale Network Embedding

Lei Sang, Min Xu, Shengsheng Qian, Xindong Wu

Abstract: Network embedding represents nodes in a continuous vector space and preserves structure information from a network. Existing methods usually adopt a “one-size-fits-all” approach when concerning multi-scale structure information, such as first- and second-order proximity of nodes, ignoring the fact that different scales play different roles in embedding learning. In this paper, we propose an Attention-based Adversarial Autoencoder Network Embedding (AAANE) framework, which promotes the collaboration of different scales and lets them vote for robust representations. The proposed AAANE consists of two components: (1) an attention-based autoencoder that effectively capture the highly non-linear network structure, which can de-emphasize irrelevant scales during training, and (2) an adversarial regularization guides the autoencoder in learning robust representations by matching the posterior distribution of the latent embeddings to a given prior distribution. Experimental results on real-world networks show that the proposed approach outperforms strong baselines.