Feedback Control for Multi-Objective Graph Self-Supervision

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Grover, Karish, Vasiloudis, Theodore, Xie, Han, Lu, Sixing, Song, Xiang, Faloutsos, Christos
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Grover, Karish
Vasiloudis, Theodore
Xie, Han
Lu, Sixing
Song, Xiang
Faloutsos, Christos
author_facet Grover, Karish
Vasiloudis, Theodore
Xie, Han
Lu, Sixing
Song, Xiang
Faloutsos, Christos
contents Can multi-task self-supervised learning on graphs be coordinated without the usual tug-of-war between objectives? Graph self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a growing toolbox of pretext objectives: mutual information, reconstruction, contrastive learning; yet combining them reliably remains a challenge due to objective interference and training instability. Most multi-pretext pipelines use per-update mixing, forcing every parameter update to be a compromise, leading to three failure modes: Disagreement (conflict-induced negative transfer), Drift (nonstationary objective utility), and Drought (hidden starvation of underserved objectives). We argue that coordination is fundamentally a temporal allocation problem: deciding when each objective receives optimization budget, not merely how to weigh them. We introduce ControlG, a control-theoretic framework that recasts multi-objective graph SSL as feedback-controlled temporal allocation by estimating per-objective difficulty and pairwise antagonism, planning target budgets via a Pareto-aware log-hypervolume planner, and scheduling with a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller. Across 9 datasets, ControlG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, while producing an auditable schedule that reveals which objectives drove learning.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_05036
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Feedback Control for Multi-Objective Graph Self-Supervision
Grover, Karish
Vasiloudis, Theodore
Xie, Han
Lu, Sixing
Song, Xiang
Faloutsos, Christos
Machine Learning
Can multi-task self-supervised learning on graphs be coordinated without the usual tug-of-war between objectives? Graph self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a growing toolbox of pretext objectives: mutual information, reconstruction, contrastive learning; yet combining them reliably remains a challenge due to objective interference and training instability. Most multi-pretext pipelines use per-update mixing, forcing every parameter update to be a compromise, leading to three failure modes: Disagreement (conflict-induced negative transfer), Drift (nonstationary objective utility), and Drought (hidden starvation of underserved objectives). We argue that coordination is fundamentally a temporal allocation problem: deciding when each objective receives optimization budget, not merely how to weigh them. We introduce ControlG, a control-theoretic framework that recasts multi-objective graph SSL as feedback-controlled temporal allocation by estimating per-objective difficulty and pairwise antagonism, planning target budgets via a Pareto-aware log-hypervolume planner, and scheduling with a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller. Across 9 datasets, ControlG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, while producing an auditable schedule that reveals which objectives drove learning.
title Feedback Control for Multi-Objective Graph Self-Supervision
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05036