Bootstrapping Informative Graph Augmentation via A Meta Learning Approach

Bootstrapping Informative Graph Augmentation via A Meta Learning Approach

Hang Gao, Jiangmeng Li, Wenwen Qiang, Lingyu Si, Fuchun Sun, Changwen Zheng

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3001-3007. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/416

Recent works explore learning graph representations in a self-supervised manner. In graph contrastive learning, benchmark methods apply various graph augmentation approaches. However, most of the augmentation methods are non-learnable, which causes the issue of generating unbeneficial augmented graphs. Such augmentation may degenerate the representation ability of graph contrastive learning methods. Therefore, we motivate our method to generate augmented graph with a learnable graph augmenter, called MEta Graph Augmentation (MEGA). We then clarify that a "good" graph augmentation must have uniformity at the instance-level and informativeness at the feature-level. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learning a graph augmenter that can generate an augmentation with uniformity and informativeness. The objective of the graph augmenter is to promote our feature extraction network to learn a more discriminative feature representation, which motivates us to propose a meta-learning paradigm. Empirically, the experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that MEGA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in graph self-supervised learning tasks. Further experimental studies prove the effectiveness of different terms of MEGA. Our codes are available at https://github.com/hang53/MEGA.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Self-supervised Learning
Machine Learning: Meta-Learning
Machine Learning: Representation learning
Machine Learning: Sequence and Graph Learning
Machine Learning: Unsupervised Learning