DARLING: Dual Hypergraph-Enhanced Curriculum-Guided Graph Structure Learning for Node Classification

Graph Structure Learning (GSL) aims to simultaneously enhance the original graph and the performance of Graph Neural Networks. However, existing GSL methods for node classification fail to consider neighborhood label dependencies during training, which limits their ability to refine the graph structure in an adaptive manner. Furthermore, the training of those methods lacks a proper schedule based on graph structure quality, thereby yielding suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GSL framework for node classification, termed DuAl hypeRgraph-enhanced curricuLum-guided graph structure learnING for node classification (DARLING). It first introduces a graph structure curriculum module to effectively discriminate the suboptimal graph structures by examining both the distribution of neighborhood labels and the degree of nodes. Subsequently, a self-supervised dual hypergraph similarity learning module is proposed to capture higher-order neighborhood label dependencies. This is achieved via formulating a pre-training task that involves hyperedge batch-filling within the dual hypergraph of the input graph. The experimental results on six datasets demonstrate that the proposed DARLING outperforms eleven state-of-the-art methods significantly, in terms of effectiveness and robustness.