Multi-View Graph Representation Learning Beyond Homophily

Abstract

Unsupervised graph representation learning(GRL) aims to distill diverse graph information into task-agnostic embeddings without label supervision. Due to a lack of support from labels, recent representation learning methods usually adopt self-supervised learning, and embeddings are learned by solving a handcrafted auxiliary task(so-called pretext task). However, partially due to the irregular non-Euclidean data in graphs, the pretext tasks are generally designed under homophily assumptions and cornered in the low-frequency signals, which results in significant loss of other signals, especially high-frequency signals widespread in graphs with heterophily. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a multi-view perspective and the usage of diverse pretext tasks to capture different signals in graphs into embeddings. A novel framework, denoted as Multi-view Graph Encoder(MVGE), is proposed, and a set of key designs are identified. More specifically, a set of new pretext tasks are designed to encode different types of signals, and a straightforward operation is propxwosed to maintain both the commodity and personalization in both the attribute and the structural levels. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world network datasets show that the node representations learned with MVGE achieve significant performance improvements in three different downstream tasks, especially on graphs with heterophily. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/G-AILab/MVGE}.