Graph contrastive learning with consistency regularization

Abstract

Contrastive learning has actively been used for unsupervised graph representation learning owing to its success in computer vision. Most graph contrastive learning methods use instance discrimination. It treats each instance as a distinct class against a query instance as the pretext task. However, such methods inevitably cause a class collision problem because some instances may belong to the same class as the query. Thus, the similarity shared through instances from the same class cannot be reflected in the pre-training stage. To address this problem, we propose graph contrastive learning with consistency regularization (GCCR), which introduces a consistency regularization term to graph contrastive learning. Unlike existing methods, GCCR can obtain a graph representation that reflects intra-class similarity by introducing a consistency regularization term. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we performed extensive experiments and demonstrated that GCCR improved the quality of graph representations for most datasets. Notably, experimental results in various settings show that the proposed method can learn effective graph representations with better robustness against transformations than other state-of-the-art methods. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.