CONVERT:Contrastive Graph Clustering with Reliable Augmentation

TL;DR

CONVERT introduces a contrastive graph clustering method that uses a reversible perturb-recover network and semantic loss to ensure reliable augmentation, improving clustering performance on multiple datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel reversible perturb-recover network and semantic loss to enhance the reliability of data augmentation in contrastive graph clustering.

Findings

Effective on seven datasets

Outperforms existing methods

Reliable semantic preservation

Abstract

Contrastive graph node clustering via learnable data augmentation is a hot research spot in the field of unsupervised graph learning. The existing methods learn the sampling distribution of a pre-defined augmentation to generate data-driven augmentations automatically. Although promising clustering performance has been achieved, we observe that these strategies still rely on pre-defined augmentations, the semantics of the augmented graph can easily drift. The reliability of the augmented view semantics for contrastive learning can not be guaranteed, thus limiting the model performance. To address these problems, we propose a novel CONtrastiVe Graph ClustEring network with Reliable AugmenTation (CONVERT). Specifically, in our method, the data augmentations are processed by the proposed reversible perturb-recover network. It distills reliable semantic information by recovering the perturbed latent embeddings. Moreover, to further guarantee the reliability of semantics, a novel semantic loss is presented to constrain the network via quantifying the perturbation and recovery. Lastly, a label-matching mechanism is designed to guide the model by clustering information through aligning the semantic labels and the selected high-confidence clustering pseudo labels. Extensive experimental results on seven datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We release the code and appendix of CONVERT at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/CONVERT on GitHub.