Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) establishes a new paradigm for learning graph representations without human annotations. Although remarkable progress has been witnessed recently, the success behind GCL is still left somewhat mysterious. In this work, we first identify several critical design considerations within a general GCL paradigm, including augmentation functions, contrasting modes, contrastive objectives, and negative mining techniques. Then, to understand the interplay of different GCL components, we conduct extensive, controlled experiments over a set of benchmark tasks on datasets across various domains. Our empirical studies suggest a set of general receipts for effective GCL, e.g., simple topology augmentations that produce sparse graph views bring promising performance improvements; contrasting modes should be aligned with the granularities of end tasks. In addition, to foster future research and ease the implementation of GCL algorithms, we develop an easy-to-use library PyGCL, featuring modularized CL components, standardized evaluation, and experiment management. We envision this work to provide useful empirical evidence of effective GCL algorithms and offer several insights for future research.

本文提出了一种利用Graph Contrastive Learning无人工标注学习图形表示的新范式，并通过对一系列基准任务和各种领域的数据集进行广泛、可控的实验，研究不同的GCL组件之间的相互作用，得出了一套有效GCL的一般特性与实现技巧。

图形对比学习的实证研究