Structure-Semantic Synergized Deep Contrastive Graph Clustering

Current contrastive graph clustering approaches suffer from insufficient integration of structural and semantic information, coupled with the absence of reliable sample selection strategies. To address these dual limitations, we introduce Structure-Semantic Synergized Deep Contrastive Graph Clustering (S³-DCGC), a novel framework that jointly models topological structure and semantic features through two synergistic mechanisms. First, a structure-aware curriculum negative sampling strategy progressively identifies hard negative samples using dynamic-range masking, enhancing discriminative structural learning. Second, a semantic confidence-guided contrastive mechanism quantifies node reliability via composite confidence scores—integrating cluster affinity and cross-view consistency—to select high-confidence positive/negative pairs. Dynamically coordinated by a soft-alignment strategy that shifts optimization focus from structural to semantic dominance during training, these components achieve balanced synergy. Comprehensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets demonstrate S³-DCGC's superiority, achieving significant performance gains. Ablation studies and visual analyses further corroborate the critical importance of structure-semantic synergy in achieving robust clustering performance.