SFCLTA: Spectral Fusion Contrastive Learning with Topology-Adaptive Graph Augmentation

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable successes in graph analysis due to the Message-Passing (MP) mechanism, yet they struggle with heterophilic graphs where connected nodes often have distinct labels or dissimilar attributes. Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) serves as a promising approach to extract the information beyond neighboring nodes, effectively mitigating the limitations of the MP mechanism in handling heterophilic graphs. Nevertheless, GCL faces two critical challenges when applied to heterophilic graphs, i.e., the potential distribution shift from data augmentation and the loss of robustness caused by high-frequency signals. To address these problems, we propose a novel model, namely the Spectral Fusion Contrastive Learning with Topology-Adaptive Graph Augmentation (SFCLTA) for unsupervised graph representation learning. Our method dynamically adjusts graph structures by a heterophily-aware augmentation strategy, and constrains high-frequency distortions by spectral regularization. We utilize the confidence-weighted fusion to enhance the robustness. Additionally, we introduce a feature reconstruction task as the prerequisites to explicitly mitigate feature-level distribution shifts. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed SFCLTA consistently outperforms baseline models in multiple tasks.