Edge Contrastive Learning: An Augmentation-Free Graph Contrastive Learning Model

Abstract

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to learn representations from unlabeled graph data in a self-supervised manner and has developed rapidly in recent years. However, edge-level contrasts are not well explored by most existing GCL methods. Most studies in GCL only regard edges as auxiliary information while updating node features. One of the primary obstacles of edge-based GCL is the heavy computation burden. To tackle this issue, we propose a model that can efficiently learn edge features for GCL, namely Augmentation-Free Edge Contrastive Learning (AFECL) to achieve edge-edge contrast. AFECL depends on no augmentation consisting of two parts. Firstly, we design a novel edge feature generation method, where edge features are computed by embedding concatenation of their connected nodes. Secondly, an edge contrastive learning scheme is developed, where edges connecting the same nodes are defined as positive pairs, and other edges are defined as negative pairs. Experimental results show that compared with recent state-of-the-art GCL methods or even some supervised GNNs, AFECL achieves SOTA performance on link prediction and semi-supervised node classification of extremely scarce labels.