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Does GCL Need a Large Number of Negative Samples? Enhancing Graph Contrastive Learning with Effective and Efficient Negative Sampling by Huang, Yongqi; Zhao, Jitao; He, Dongxiao; Jin, Di; Huang, Yuxiao; Wang, Zhen is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

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Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) aims to self-supervised learn low-dimensional graph representations, primarily through instance discrimination, which involves manually mining positive and negative pairs from graphs, increasing the similarity of positive pairs while decreasing negative pairs. Drawing from the success of Contrastive Learning (CL) in other domains, a consensus has been reached that the effectiveness of GCLs depends on a large number of negative pairs. As a result, despite the significant computational overhead, GCLs typically leverage as many negative node pairs as possible to improve model performance. However, given that nodes within a graph are interconnected, we argue that nodes cannot be treated as independent instances. Therefore, we challenge this consensus: Does employing more negative nodes lead to a more effective GCL model? To answer this, we explore the role of negative nodes in the commonly used InfoNCE loss for GCL and observe that: (1) Counterintuitively, a large number of negative nodes can actually hinder the model's ability to distinguish nodes with different semantics. (2) A smaller number of high-quality and non-topologically coupled negative node

Author

Huang, Yongqi; Zhao, Jitao; He, Dongxiao; Jin, Di; Huang, Yuxiao; Wang, Zhen

Published

2025

Language

EN