Adversarial Hard Negative Generation for Complementary Graph Contrastive Learning

Abstract

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has attracted rising research attention recently due to its effectiveness in self- supervised graph learning. A key step of GCL is to conduct data augmentation, based on which self-supervised learning is performed through the contrast between two augmented data views. Existing approaches generally generate the two data views from the original graph, which has been revealed to be less effective due to the lack of data diversity. Meanwhile, although the data augmentation methods and the contrastive modes have been extensively studied, the effect of hard negative samples (i.e.samples that are difficult to distinguish from an anchor node) on GCL is not fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel complementary graph contrastive learning method boosted by adversarial hard negative sample generation. Specifically, we first construct a κNN graph as the complementary counterpart of the original graph in the semantic space. Then graph augmentation is conducted in both the semantic and topology spaces for the two complementary graphs to obtain two contrastive views with a larger data diversity. To facilitate the contrastive learning, an adversarial network named ADNet is also proposed to generate hard negative samples. The generated samples are more informative and challenging, and thus can further boost the learning performance. Extensive evaluations over the node classification task demonstrate that our proposal outperforms existing state-of-the-art GCL methods, and even exceeds supervised approaches. The code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/sktsherlock/HNGCL-V1.