Explanation-Preserving Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Graph Representation Learning

Self-supervised graph representation learning (GRL) typically generates paired graph augmentations from each graph to infer similar representations for augmentations of the same graph, but distinguishable representations for different graphs. While effective augmentation requires both semantics-preservation and data-perturbation, most existing GRL methods focus solely on data-perturbation, leading to suboptimal solutions. To fill the gap, in this paper, we propose a novel method, Explanation-Preserving Augmentation (EPA), which leverages graph explanation for semantics-preservation. EPA first uses a small number of labels to train a graph explainer, which infers the subgraphs that explain the graph’s label. Then these explanations are used for generating semantics-preserving augmentations for boosting self-supervised GRL. Thus, the entire process, namely EPA-GRL, is semi-supervised. We demonstrate theoretically, using an analytical example, and through extensive experiments on a variety of benchmark datasets, that EPA-GRL outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) GRL methods that use semantics-agnostic augmentations.

Authors

• Zhuomin Chen Florida International University
• Jingchao Ni AWS AI Labs
• Hojat Allah Salehi Florida International University
• Xu Zheng
• Esteban Schafir Florida International University
• Farhad Shirani Florida International University, Miami, U.S.
• Dongsheng Luo Florida International University, Miami, U.S.

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.