Dual Refinement Cycle Learning: Unsupervised Text Classification of Mamba and Community Detection on Text Attributed Graph

TL;DR

This paper introduces DRCL, an unsupervised framework that combines structural and semantic information for text classification and community detection on text-attributed graphs, eliminating the need for labeled data.

Contribution

DRCL is a novel unsupervised method that iteratively refines community detection and text semantics, enabling practical deployment without labeled data.

Findings

DRCL improves community detection quality on multiple datasets.

A Mamba classifier trained with DRCL achieves supervised-level accuracy.

The framework effectively integrates structural and semantic cues without manual labels.

Abstract

Pretrained language models offer strong text understanding capabilities but remain difficult to deploy in real-world text-attributed networks due to their heavy dependence on labeled data. Meanwhile, community detection methods typically ignore textual semantics, limiting their usefulness in downstream applications such as content organization, recommendation, and risk monitoring. To overcome these limitations, we present Dual Refinement Cycle Learning (DRCL), a fully unsupervised framework designed for practical scenarios where no labels or category definitions are available. DRCL integrates structural and semantic information through a warm-start initialization and a bidirectional refinement cycle between a GCN-based Community Detection Module (GCN-CDM) and a Text Semantic Modeling Module (TSMM). The two modules iteratively exchange pseudo-labels, allowing semantic cues to enhance structural clustering and structural patterns to guide text representation learning without manual supervision. Across several text-attributed graph datasets, DRCL consistently improves the structural and semantic quality of discovered communities. Moreover, a Mamba-based classifier trained solely from DRCL's community signals achieves accuracy comparable to supervised models, demonstrating its potential for deployment in large-scale systems where labeled data are scarce or costly. The code is available at https://github.com/wuanghoong/DRCL.git.