Reinforcement Graph Clustering with Unknown Cluster Number
Abstract
Deep graph clustering, which aims to group nodes into disjoint clusters by neural networks in an unsupervised manner, has attracted great attention in recent years. Although the performance has been largely improved, the excellent performance of the existing methods heavily relies on an accurately predefined cluster number, which is not always available in the real-world scenario. To enable the deep graph clustering algorithms to work without the guidance of the predefined cluster number, we propose a new deep graph clustering method termed Reinforcement Graph Clustering (RGC). In our proposed method, cluster number determination and unsupervised representation learning are unified into a uniform framework by the reinforcement learning mechanism. Concretely, the discriminative node representations are first learned with the contrastive pretext task. Then, to capture the clustering state accurately with both local and global information in the graph, both node and cluster states are considered. Subsequently, at each state, the qualities of different cluster numbers are evaluated by the quality network, and the greedy action is executed to determine the cluster number. In order to conduct feedback actions, the clustering-oriented reward function is proposed to enhance the cohesion of the same clusters and separate the different clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The source code of RGC is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/RGC and a collection (papers, codes and, datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering on Github.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 2 datasets Non-standard metric on 2 datasets
Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).
Hypergraph Benchmarks
AMAP
Global leaderboard →Default metric is Accuracy. The paper reports 0 values on Accuracy , 19 values on NMI and 19 values on ARI .
Sorted by NMI. Highlighted rows are from other papers.
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ default | NMI ↑ | ARI ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DCRN | 0.7370 | —
| — | Accuracy
0.7370 ARI
— |
| 2 | two unsupervised strategies | 0.7081
±
0.0074 | —
| — | Accuracy
0.7081
±
0.0074 ARI
— |
| 3 | AMLP | 0.6977 | —
| — | Accuracy
0.6977 ARI
— |
| 4 | RGC | — | 0.6961
±
0.0036 | 0.5958
±
0.0039 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.5958
±
0.0039 |
| 5 | DFCN | — | 0.6921 best reported | 0.5828
±
0.0074 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.5828
±
0.0074 best today: Aggregation-aware MLP: An Unsupervised Approach for Graph Message-passing (2025) |
| 9 | AGC-DRR | — | 0.6654
±
0.0124 | 0.6015
±
0.0156 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.6015
±
0.0156 |
| 11 | AGE | — | 0.6538
±
0.0061 | 0.5589
±
0.0134 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.5589
±
0.0134 |
| 12 | DAEGC | — | 0.6525
±
0.0045 | 0.5812
±
0.0024 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.5812
±
0.0024 |
| 13 | AFGRL | — | 0.6405
±
0.0015 | 0.5445
±
0.0048 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.5445
±
0.0048 |
| 15 | MGAE | — | 0.6213
±
0.0279 | 0.4882
±
0.0457 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.4882
±
0.0457 |
| 20 | SUBLIME | — | 0.6000
±0.0400 best reported | 0.0536
±
0.0214 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.0536
±
0.0214 best today: Non-Dissipative Graph Propagation for Non-Local Community Detection (2025) |
| 22 | ARGA | — | 0.5836
±
0.0276 | 0.4418
±
0.0441 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.4418
±
0.0441 |
| 23 | AdaGAE | — | 0.5596
±
0.0087 | 0.4620
±
0.0045 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.4620
±
0.0045 |
| 27 | AutoSSL | — | 0.4856
±
0.0071 | 0.2687
±
0.0034 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.2687
±
0.0034 |
| 28 | GCA | — | 0.4838
±
0.0238 | 0.2685
±
0.0044 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.2685
±
0.0044 |
| 29 | SDCN | — | 0.4485
±
0.0083 | 0.3121
±
0.0123 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.3121
±
0.0123 |
| 30 | ProGCL | — | 0.3956
±
0.0039 | 0.3418
±
0.0089 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.3418
±
0.0089 |
| 31 | DCN | — | 0.3876
±
0.0030 | 0.2080
±
0.0047 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.2080
±
0.0047 |
| 32 | IDEC | — | 0.3783
±
0.0008 | 0.1924
±
0.0007 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.1924
±
0.0007 |
| 33 | DEC | — | 0.3735
±
0.0005 | 0.1859
±
0.0004 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.1859
±
0.0004 |
| 34 | GDCL | — | 0.3732
±
0.0028 | 0.2157
±
0.0051 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.2157
±
0.0051 |
| 35 | MVGRL | — | 0.3689 best reported | 0.1877
±
0.0234 | Accuracy
— ARI
0.1877
±
0.0234 best today: Aggregation-aware MLP: An Unsupervised Approach for Graph Message-passing (2025) |
BAT
Global leaderboard →Default metric is F1. The paper reports 0 values on F1 , 21 values on NMI and 21 values on ARI .
Sorted by NMI. Highlighted rows are from other papers.
| # | Model | F1 ↑ default | NMI ↑ | ARI ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | RGC | — | 0.5158
±
0.0083 | 0.4716
±
0.0135 | F1
— ARI
0.4716
±
0.0135 |
| 2 | ARGA | — | 0.4909
±
0.0054 | 0.4202
±
0.0121 | F1
— ARI
0.4202
±
0.0121 |
| 3 | DFCN | — | 0.4877
±
0.0051 | 0.3776
±
0.0023 | F1
— ARI
0.3776
±
0.0023 |
| 5 | DCRN | — | 0.4723
±
0.0074 | 0.3976
±
0.0087 | F1
— ARI
0.3976
±
0.0087 |
| 6 | GCA | — | 0.3888
±
0.0023 | 0.2669
±
0.0285 | F1
— ARI
0.2669
±
0.0285 |
| 7 | AGE | — | 0.3604
±
0.0154 | 0.2659
±
0.0183 | F1
— ARI
0.2659
±
0.0183 |
| 9 | GDCL | — | 0.3170
±
0.0042 | 0.1933
±
0.0057 | F1
— ARI
0.1933
±
0.0057 |
| 10 | MVGRL | — | 0.3100
±0.0700 best reported | 0.1345
±
0.0003 | F1
— ARI
0.1345
±
0.0003 best today: Non-Dissipative Graph Propagation for Non-Local Community Detection (2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 11 | MGAE | — | 0.3059
±
0.0206 | 0.2415
±
0.0170 | F1
— ARI
0.2415
±
0.0170 |
| 13 | ProGCL | — | 0.2869
±
0.0092 | 0.2184
±
0.0134 | F1
— ARI
0.2184
±
0.0134 |
| 14 | AFGRL | — | 0.2755
±
0.0062 | 0.2189
±
0.0074 | F1
— ARI
0.2189
±
0.0074 |
| 15 | SUBLIME | — | 0.2700
±0.0500 best reported | 0.1445
±
0.0087 | F1
— ARI
0.1445
±
0.0087 best today: Non-Dissipative Graph Propagation for Non-Local Community Detection (2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 16 | SDCN | — | 0.2574
±
0.0571 | 0.2104
±
0.0497 | F1
— ARI
0.2104
±
0.0497 |
| 17 | DAEGC | — | 0.2500
±0.0400 best reported | 0.1818
±
0.0029 | F1
— ARI
0.1818
±
0.0029 best today: Non-Dissipative Graph Propagation for Non-Local Community Detection (2025) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 18 | MCGC | — | 0.2311
±
0.0056 | 0.0841
±
0.0032 | F1
— ARI
0.0841
±
0.0032 |
| 20 | AGC-DRR | — | 0.1991
±
0.0024 | 0.1459
±
0.0013 | F1
— ARI
0.1459
±
0.0013 |
| 21 | DCN | — | 0.1803
±
0.0773 | 0.1375
±
0.0605 | F1
— ARI
0.1375
±
0.0605 |
| 22 | AutoSSL | — | 0.1784
±
0.0098 | 0.1311
±
0.0081 | F1
— ARI
0.1311
±
0.0081 |
| 23 | AdaGAE | — | 0.1584
±
0.0078 | 0.0780
±
0.0041 | F1
— ARI
0.0780
±
0.0041 |
| 25 | DEC | — | 0.1410
±
0.0199 | 0.0799
±
0.0121 | F1
— ARI
0.0799
±
0.0121 |
| 26 | IDEC | — | 0.1280
±
0.0174 | 0.0785
±
0.0131 | F1
— ARI
0.0785
±
0.0131 |
