We conjecture the current performance of graph contrastive learning might be limited by the violation of the label-invariant augmentationassumption.

Recently, contrastiveness-based augmentation surges a new climax in the computer vision domain, where some operations, including rotation, crop, and flip, combined with dedicated algorithms, dramatically increase the model generalization and robustness. Following this trend, some pioneering attempts employ the similar idea to graph data. Nevertheless, unlike images, it is much more difficult to design reasonable augmentations without changing the nature of graphs. Although exciting, the current graph contrastive learning does not achieve as promising performance as visual contrastive learning. We conjecture the current performance of graph contrastive learning might be limited by the violation of the label-invariant augmentation assumption. In light of this, we propose a label-invariant augmentation for graph-structured data to address this challenge. Different from the node/edge modification and subgraph extraction, we conduct the augmentation in the representation space and generate the augmented samples in the most difficult direction while keeping the label of augmented data the same as the original samples. In the semi-supervised scenario, we demonstrate our proposed method outperforms the classical graph neural network based methods and recent graph contrastive learning on eight benchmark graph-structured data, followed by several in-depth experiments to further explore the label-invariant augmentation in several aspects.

Nevertheless, unlike images, it is much more difficult to design reasonable augmentations without changing the nature of graphs.

Recently, contrastiveness-based augmentation surges a new climax in the computer vision domain, where some operations, including rotation, crop, and flip, combined with dedicated algorithms, dramatically increase the model generalization and robustness. Following this trend, some pioneering attempts employ the similar idea to graph data. Nevertheless, unlike images, it is much more difficult to design reasonable augmentations without changing the nature of graphs. Although exciting, the current graph contrastive learning does not achieve as promising performance as visual contrastive learning. We conjecture the current performance of graph contrastive learning might be limited by the violation of the label-invariant augmentation assumption.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is an important issue for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Recent works employ different graph editions to generate augmented environments and learn an invariant GNN for generalization. However, the label shift usually occurs in augmentation since graph structural edition inevitably alters the graph label. This brings inconsistent predictive relationships among augmented environments, which is harmful to generalization. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{LiSA}, which generates label-invariant augmentations to facilitate graph OOD generalization. Instead of resorting to graph editions, LiSA exploits \textbf{L}abel-\textbf{i}nvariant \textbf{S}ubgraphs of the training graphs to construct \textbf{A}ugmented environments. Specifically, LiSA first designs the variational subgraph generators to extract locally predictive patterns and construct multiple label-invariant subgraphs efficiently. Then, the subgraphs produced by different generators are collected to build different augmented environments. To promote diversity among augmented environments, LiSA further introduces a tractable energy-based regularization to enlarge pair-wise distances between the distributions of environments. In this manner, LiSA generates diverse augmented environments with a consistent predictive relationship and facilitates learning an invariant GNN. Extensive experiments on node-level and graph-level OOD benchmarks show that LiSA achieves impressive generalization performance with different GNN backbones. Code is available on \url{https://github.com/Samyu0304/LiSA}.