Why Does Dropping Edges Usually Outperform Adding Edges in Graph Contrastive Learning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Xu, Yanchen, Huang, Siqi, Zhang, Hongyuan, Li, Xuelong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Xu, Yanchen
Huang, Siqi
Zhang, Hongyuan
Li, Xuelong
author_facet Xu, Yanchen
Huang, Siqi
Zhang, Hongyuan
Li, Xuelong
contents Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has been widely used as an effective self-supervised learning method for graph representation learning. However, how to apply adequate and stable graph augmentation to generating proper views for contrastive learning remains an essential problem. Dropping edges is a primary augmentation in GCL while adding edges is not a common method due to its unstable performance. To our best knowledge, there is no theoretical analysis to study why dropping edges usually outperforms adding edges. To answer this question, we introduce a new metric, namely Error Passing Rate (EPR), to quantify how a graph fits the network. Inspired by the theoretical conclusions and the idea of positive-incentive noise, we propose a novel GCL algorithm, Error-PAssing-based Graph Contrastive Learning (EPAGCL), which uses both edge adding and edge dropping as its augmentations. To be specific, we generate views by adding and dropping edges based on the weights derived from EPR. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets are conducted to validate the correctness of our theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hyzhang98/EPAGCL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why Does Dropping Edges Usually Outperform Adding Edges in Graph Contrastive Learning?
Xu, Yanchen
Huang, Siqi
Zhang, Hongyuan
Li, Xuelong
Machine Learning
Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has been widely used as an effective self-supervised learning method for graph representation learning. However, how to apply adequate and stable graph augmentation to generating proper views for contrastive learning remains an essential problem. Dropping edges is a primary augmentation in GCL while adding edges is not a common method due to its unstable performance. To our best knowledge, there is no theoretical analysis to study why dropping edges usually outperforms adding edges. To answer this question, we introduce a new metric, namely Error Passing Rate (EPR), to quantify how a graph fits the network. Inspired by the theoretical conclusions and the idea of positive-incentive noise, we propose a novel GCL algorithm, Error-PAssing-based Graph Contrastive Learning (EPAGCL), which uses both edge adding and edge dropping as its augmentations. To be specific, we generate views by adding and dropping edges based on the weights derived from EPR. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets are conducted to validate the correctness of our theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hyzhang98/EPAGCL.
title Why Does Dropping Edges Usually Outperform Adding Edges in Graph Contrastive Learning?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08128