Graph Contrastive Learning with Progressive Augmentations

To be still yet still moving. - Do Hyun Choe Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has recently gained prominence in unsupervised graph representation learning. Traditional GCL approaches generally focus on creating a single contrastive view alongside the main graph view, targeting invariant representation learning in a static framework. Our study introduces a novel manner: despite using static graphs, we aim to learn invariant representations by generating a series of evolving contrastive views with temporal coherence and multi-viewpoint insights at various granularities. In this context, we propose the Progressive Augmentation framework for Graph Contrastive Learning (PaGCL). This framework advances beyond traditional methods by producing a sequence of augmented views, each evolving from the previous one, and assigning timestamps based on piecewise smoothness. This approach enables our model to more effectively extract invariant features from these dynamic views, capturing multi-grained structural and temporal information. Our experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that PaGCL significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.