Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning: a Homophily and Heterogeneity View

Self-supervised heterogeneous graph learning has achieved promising results in various real applications, but it still suffers from the following issues: (i) metapaths can be employed to capture the homophily in the heterogeneous graph, but meta-paths are human-defined, requiring substantial expert knowledge and computational costs; and (ii) the heterogeneity in the heterogeneous graph is usually underutilized, leading to the loss of task-related information. To solve these issues, this paper proposes to capture both homophily and heterogeneity in the heterogeneous graph without pre-defined meta-paths. Specifically, we propose to learn a self-expressive matrix to capture the homophily from the subspace and nearby neighbors. Meanwhile, we propose to capture the heterogeneity by aggregating the information of nodes from different types. We further design a consistency loss and a specificity loss, respectively, to extract the consistent information between homophily and heterogeneity and to preserve their specific task-related information.

We theoretically analyze that the learned homophilous representations exhibit the grouping effect to capture the homophily, and considering both homophily and heterogeneity introduces more task-related information. Extensive experimental results verify the superiority of the proposed method on different downstream tasks.