ERMAV: Efficient and Robust Graph Contrastive Learning via Multiadversarial Views Training

Abstract

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) is emerging as a pivotal technique in graph representation learning. However, recent research indicates that GCL is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, while existing robust GCL methods against adversarial attacks are inefficient and lack scalability due to the significant computational expenses of explicit adversarial attacks on the graph structure. To address the shortcomings of existing approaches, we propose an efficient and robust GCL via multiadversarial views training framework, called ERMAV. Specifically, the ERMAV generates two adversarial views by attacking both node attributes and latent representations on randomly sampled subgraphs. The method conducts explicit adversarial attacks on node attributes by attacking node attributes and implicit adversarial attacks on the graph structure by attacking latent representations, which avoids the costly computation of explicit graph structure attacks. Moreover, two efficient attack methods are developed to construct adversarial perturbations, which can dynamically generate different adversarial views to enhance sample diversity in the training phase. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework, extensive experiments of node classification on seven real-world datasets are conducted. Experimental results show that our ERMAV outperforms state-of-the-art GCL methods on the original graphs and is consistently more robust than existing robust GCL methods on a variety of attacked graphs. This demonstrates the strong robustness and great potential of our ERMAV in real-world applications.