Self-Guided Graph Refinement With Progressive Fusion for Multiplex Graph Contrastive Representation Learning

Multiplex Graph Contrastive Learning (MGCL) has attracted significant attention. However, existing MGCL methods often struggle with suboptimal graph structures and fail to fully capture intricate interdependencies across multiplex views. To address these issues, we propose a novel self-supervised framework, Multiplex Graph Refinement with progressive fusion (MGRefine), for multiplex graph contrastive representation learning. Specifically, MGRefine introduces a multi-view learning module to extract a structural guidance matrix by exploring the underlying relationships between nodes. Then, a progressive fusion module is employed to progressively enhance and fuse representations from different views, capturing and leveraging nuanced interdependencies and comprehensive information across the multiplex graphs. The fused representation is then used to construct a consensus guidance matrix. A self-enhanced refinement module continuously refines the multiplex graphs using these guidance matrices while providing effective supervision signals. MGRefine achieves mutual reinforcement between graph structures and representations, ensuring continuous optimization of the model throughout the learning process in a self-enhanced manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGRefine outperforms state-of-the-art methods and also verify the effectiveness of MGRefine across various downstream tasks on several benchmark datasets.