Norm Augmented Graph AutoEncoders for Link Prediction

Link Prediction (LP) is a crucial problem in graph-structured data. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained prominence in LP, with Graph AutoEncoders (GAEs) being a notable representation. However, our empirical findings reveal that GAEs' LP performance suffers heavily from the long-tailed node degree distribution, i.e., low-degree nodes tend to exhibit inferior LP performance compared to high-degree nodes. \emph{What causes this degree-related bias, and how can it be mitigated?} In this study, we demonstrate that the norm of node embeddings learned by GAEs exhibits variation among nodes with different degrees, underscoring its central significance in influencing the final performance of LP. Specifically, embeddings with larger norms tend to guide the decoder towards predicting higher scores for positive links and lower scores for negative links, thereby contributing to superior performance. This observation motivates us to improve GAEs' LP performance on low-degree nodes by increasing their embedding norms, which can be implemented simply yet effectively by introducing additional self-loops into the training objective for low-degree nodes. This norm augmentation strategy can be seamlessly integrated into existing GAE methods with light computational cost. Extensive experiments on various datasets and GAE methods show the superior performance of norm-augmented GAEs.

Bootstrap Latents of Nodes and Neighbors for Graph Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive learning is a significant paradigm in graph self-supervised learning. However, it requires negative samples to prevent model collapse and learn discriminative representations. These negative samples inevitably lead to heavy computation, memory overhead and class collision, compromising the representation learning. Recent studies present that methods obviating negative samples can attain competitive performance and scalability enhancements, exemplified by bootstrapped graph latents (BGRL). However, BGRL neglects the inherent graph homophily, which provides valuable insights into underlying positive pairs. Our motivation arises from the observation that subtly introducing a few ground-truth positive pairs significantly improves BGRL. Although we can't obtain ground-truth positive pairs without labels under the self-supervised setting, edges in the graph can reflect noisy positive pairs, i.e., neighboring nodes often share the same label. Therefore, we propose to expand the positive pair set with node-neighbor pairs. Subsequently, we introduce a cross-attention module to predict the supportiveness score of a neighbor with respect to the anchor node. This score quantifies the positive support from each neighboring node, and is encoded into the training objective. Consequently, our method mitigates class collision from negative and noisy positive samples, concurrently enhancing intra-class compactness. Extensive experiments are conducted on five benchmark datasets and three downstream task node classification, node clustering, and node similarity search. The results demonstrate that our method generates node representations with enhanced intra-class compactness and achieves state-of-the-art performance.