Localized Graph Contrastive Learning
Abstract
Contrastive learning methods based on InfoNCE loss are popular in node representation learning tasks on graph-structured data. However, its reliance on data augmentation and its quadratic computational complexity might lead to inconsistency and inefficiency problems. To mitigate these limitations, in this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective contrastive model named Localized Graph Contrastive Learning (in short). consists of two key designs: 1) We fabricate the positive examples for each node directly using its first-order neighbors, which frees our method from the reliance on carefully-designed graph augmentations; 2) To improve the efficiency of contrastive learning on graphs, we devise a kernelized contrastive loss, which could be approximately computed in linear time and space complexity with respect to the graph size. We provide theoretical analysis to justify the effectiveness and rationality of the proposed methods. Experiments on various datasets with different scales and properties demonstrate that in spite of its simplicity, achieves quite competitive performance in self-supervised node representation learning tasks on graphs with various scales and properties.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 4 datasets 9 baseline values reported too low
Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).
Classic
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9703
±0.0019 | |
| 2 | GAT | 0.9669
±0.0014 | |
| 3 | GAT+T | 0.9660
±0.0007 | |
| 7 | SAGE | 0.9643
±0.0027 | |
| 130 | AFGRL | 0.9361
±0.0020 best reported | best at pub: Wiener Graph Deconvolutional Network Improves Graph Self-Supervised Learning (AAAI 2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 172 | BGRL | 0.9337
±0.0021 best reported | best at pub: Wiener Graph Deconvolutional Network Improves Graph Self-Supervised Learning (AAAI 2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 186 | CCA-SSG | 0.9325
±0.0021 best reported | best at pub: Wiener Graph Deconvolutional Network Improves Graph Self-Supervised Learning (AAAI 2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 188 | Local-GCL | 0.9325
±0.0040 | This paper |
| 191 | GCA | 0.9320
±0.0060 best reported | best at pub: Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes (2022) best today: Decoupling Weighing and Selecting for Integrating Multiple Graph Pre-training Tasks (ICLR 2024) |
| 194 | SUGRL | 0.9307
±0.0015 | prev best: Graph Soft-Contrastive Learning via Neighborhood Ranking (2022) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 203 | GRACE | 0.9313
±0.0017 best reported | best at pub: Learning Graph Augmentations to Learn Graph Representations (2022) best today: Learn Beneficial Noise as Graph Augmentation (ICML 2025) |
| 206 | MVGRL | 0.9310
±0.0040 best reported | best at pub: Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating (AAAI 2022) best today: Decoupling Weighing and Selecting for Integrating Multiple Graph Pre-training Tasks (ICLR 2024) |
| 213 | DGI | 0.9309
±0.0008 best reported | best at pub: Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation (WWW 2020) |
| 284 | AF-GCL | 0.9249
±0.0031 | This paper |
| 390 | MLP | 0.9128
±0.0063 | |
| 408 | GMI | 0.9073
±0.0024 | prev best: Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating (AAAI 2022) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9461
±0.0017 | |
| 2 | GCN | 0.9412
±0.0008 | |
| 3 | GAT | 0.9398
±0.0022 | |
| 8 | SAGE | 0.9351
±0.0006 | |
| 79 | BGRL | 0.9034
±0.0019 best reported | best at pub: Spectral Augmentation for Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs (ICLR 2022) best today: Adaptive Negative Scheduling for Graph Contrastive Learning (2026) |
| 112 | AFGRL | 0.8988
±0.0033 | This paper |
| 127 | AF-GCL | 0.8968
±0.0019 | This paper |
| 139 | GRACE | 0.8953
±0.0035 best reported | best at pub: Spectral Augmentation for Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs (ICLR 2022) best today: Adaptive Negative Scheduling for Graph Contrastive Learning (2026) |
| 159 | CCA-SSG | 0.8896
±0.0013 best reported | best at pub: Graph Soft-Contrastive Learning via Neighborhood Ranking (2022) best today: Str-GCL: Structural Commonsense Driven Graph Contrastive Learning (WWW 2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 160 | GCA | 0.8894
±0.0015 best reported | best at pub: Barlow Graph Auto-Encoder for Unsupervised Network Embedding (2021) best today: Adaptive Negative Scheduling for Graph Contrastive Learning (2026) |
| 162 | SUGRL | 0.8893
±0.0021 | prev best: Graph Soft-Contrastive Learning via Neighborhood Ranking (2022) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 169 | kernelized contrastive loss computation | 0.8881
±0.0037 | This paper |
| 179 | MVGRL | 0.8861
±0.0064 best reported | best at pub: Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation (WWW 2020) |
| 210 | DGI | 0.8798
±0.0081 best reported | best at pub: Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes (2022) best today: Bootstrap Latents of Nodes and Neighbors for Graph Self-Supervised Learning (2024) |
| 320 | MLP | 0.8463 | |
| 342 | GMI | 0.8422
±0.0052 | prev best: Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation (WWW 2020) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GrokFormer | 0.9831
±0.0018 | |
| 2 | PolyFormer | 0.9808
±0.0027 | |
| 3 | SGFormer | 0.9796
±0.0081 | |
| 9 | GCN | 0.9774
±0.0035 | |
| 47 | Local-GCL | 0.9633
±0.0013 | This paper |
| 58 | MLP | 0.9597
±0.0007 | |
| 69 | BGRL | 0.9580
±0.0040 best reported | best at pub: Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes (2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 106 | CCA-SSG | 0.9559
±0.0007 best reported | best at pub: Wiener Graph Deconvolutional Network Improves Graph Self-Supervised Learning (AAAI 2022) |
| 125 | MVGRL | 0.9544
±0.0027 best reported | best at pub: Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation (WWW 2020) best today: HAT-GAE: Self-Supervised Graph Auto-encoders with Hierarchical Adaptive Masking and Trainable Corruption (2023) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 134 | SUGRL | 0.9538
±0.0011 | This paper |
| 154 | AF-GCL | 0.9512
±0.0015 | This paper |
| 167 | DGI | 0.9489
±0.0009 best reported | best at pub: Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating (AAAI 2022) best today: Balancing Graph Embedding Smoothness in Self-Supervised Learning via Information-Theoretic Decomposition (WWW 2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
