Augmentation-Free Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs

Abstract Inspired by the recent success of self-supervised methods applied on images, self-supervised learning on graph structured data has seen rapid growth especially centered on augmentation-based contrastive methods. However, we argue that without carefully designed augmentation techniques, augmentations on graphs may behave arbitrarily in that the underlying semantics of graphs can drastically change. As a consequence, the performance of existing augmentation-based methods is highly dependent on the choice of augmentation scheme, i.e., augmentation hyperparameters and combinations of augmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel augmentation-free self-supervised learning framework for graphs, named AFGRL. Specifically, we generate an alternative view of a graph by discovering nodes that share the local structural information and the global semantics with the graph. Extensive experiments towards various node-level tasks, i.e., node classification, clustering, and similarity search on various real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of AFGRL. The source code for AFGRL is available at https://github.com/Namkyeong/AFGRL.