Why Does Dropping Edges Usually Outperform Adding Edges in Graph Contrastive 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.

Authors

• Yanchen Xu School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom
• Siqi Huang School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom
• Hongyuan Zhang Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, P. R. China The University of Hong Kong
• Xuelong Li Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom

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