CuCo: Graph Representation with Curriculum Contrastive Learning

Graph-level representation learning is to learn low-dimensional representation for the entire graph, which has shown a large impact on real-world applications. Recently, limited by expensive labeled data, contrastive learning based graph-level representation learning attracts considerable attention. However, these methods mainly focus on graph augmentation for positive samples, while the effect of negative samples is less explored. In this paper, we study the impact of negative samples on learning graph-level representations, and a novel curriculum contrastive learning framework for self-supervised graph-level representation, called CuCo, is proposed. Specifically, we introduce four graph augmentation techniques to obtain the positive and negative samples, and utilize graph neural networks to learn their representations. Then a scoring function is proposed to sort the negative samples from easy to hard, and a pacing function is to automatically select the negative samples in each training procedure. Extensive experiments on fifteen graph classification real-world datasets, as well as the parameter analysis, well demonstrate that our proposed CuCo yields truly encouraging results in terms of performance on classification and convergence.