SimGRL: a simple self-supervised graph representation learning framework via triplets

Abstract

Recently, graph contrastive learning (GCL) has achieved remarkable performance in graph representation learning. However, existing GCL methods usually follow a dual-channel encoder network (i.e., Siamese networks), which adds to the complexity of the network architecture. Additionally, these methods overly depend on varied data augmentation techniques, corrupting graph information. Furthermore, they are heavily reliant on large quantities of negative nodes for each object node, which requires tremendous memory costs. To address these issues, we propose a novel and simple graph representation learning framework, named SimGRL. Firstly, our proposed network architecture only contains one encoder based on a graph neural network instead of a dual-channel encoder, which simplifies the network architecture. Then we introduce a distributor to generate triplets to obtain the contrastive views between nodes and their neighbors, avoiding the need for data augmentations. Finally, we design a triplet loss based on adjacency information in graphs that utilizes only one negative node for each object node, reducing memory overhead significantly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SimGRL achieves competitive performance on node classification and graph classification tasks, especially in terms of running time and memory overhead.