Learning Graph Representation by Aggregating Subgraphs via Mutual Information Maximization
Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised learning method to enhance the graph-level representations with the help of a set of subgraphs. For this purpose, we propose a universal framework to generate subgraphs in an auto-regressive way and then using these subgraphs to guide the learning of graph representation by Graph Neural Networks. Under this framework, we can get a comprehensive understanding of the graph structure in a learnable way. And to fully capture enough information of original graphs, we design three information aggregators: attribute-conv, layer-conv and subgraph-conv to gather information from different aspects. And to achieve efficient and effective contrastive learning, a Head-Tail contrastive construction is proposed to provide abundant negative samples. Under all proposed components which can be generalized to any Graph Neural Networks, in the unsupervised case, we achieve new state-of-the-art results in several benchmarks. We also evaluate our model on semi-supervised learning tasks and make a fair comparison to state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 1 dataset 1 baseline value reported too low
Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).
TU Dortmund
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MSH-GNN | 0.9910
±0.0030 | |
| 2 | ID-GNN+BEC | 0.9830
±0.0360 | |
| 3 | SupCosine | 0.9830
±0.0250 | |
| 39 | GIN | 0.9330
±0.0290 | |
| 63 | GCN | 0.9220
±0.0440 best reported | best at pub: Hierarchical Graph Capsule Network (AAAI 2020) best today: Depth-Adaptive Graph Neural Networks via Learnable Bakry-Émery Curvature (KDD 2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 78 | GDN | 0.9180
±0.0050 | This paper |
| 159 | WL | 0.9040
±0.0570 best reported | best at pub: Understanding Isomorphism Bias in Graph Data Sets (2019) best today: How Powerful are $K$-hop Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (NeurIPS 2022) |
| 158 | GraphSAGE | 0.9040
±0.0780 best reported | best at pub: Graph Neural Networks With Convolutional ARMA Filters (2019) best today: Asynchronous Neural Networks for Learning in Graphs (2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 183 | GAT | 0.9010
±0.0580 best reported | best at pub: Quaternion Graph Neural Networks (2020) best today: The Expressive Power of Graph Neural Networks: A Survey (2023) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 238 | GIN-0 | 0.8940
±0.0560 | This paper |
| 257 | InfoGraph | 0.8930
±0.0514 best reported | best at pub: Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs (ICML 2020) best today: Improving Expressivity of GNNs with Subgraph-specific Factor Embedded Normalization (KDD 2023) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 268 | hassani2020contrastive | 0.8920
±0.0110 | This paper |
| 274 | GIN-ε | 0.8900
±0.0600 | This paper |
| 332 | MLG | 0.8794
±0.0161 best reported | best at pub: The Multiscale Laplacian Graph Kernel (NeurIPS 2016) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 365 | DGK | 0.8744
±0.0272 best reported | best at pub: Provably Powerful Graph Networks (NeurIPS 2019) best today: Model-Driven Graph Contrastive Learning (2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 403 | MLP | 0.8660
±0.0495 | |
| 407 | graph2vec | 0.8644
±0.0125 best reported | best at pub: CogDL: A Comprehensive Library for Graph Deep Learning (WWW 2021) best today: Graph Masked Autoencoders with Transformers (2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 426 | SP | 0.8580
±0.0020 best reported | best at pub: Propagation Kernels (2014) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 472 | Sub2Vec | 0.6160
±0.1580 | prev best: Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs (ICML 2020) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 501 | RW | 0.8370
±0.0150 | prev best: Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for Graphs (ICML 2016) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 506 | GK | 0.8350
±0.0060 best reported | best at pub: Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs (ICML 2020) best today: Supervised Contrastive Learning with Structure Inference for Graph Classification (2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 746 | Node2Vec | 0.7263
±0.1020 best reported | best at pub: Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs (ICML 2020) best today: Model-Driven Graph Contrastive Learning (2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
