Temporal and Topological Augmentation-based Cross-view Contrastive Learning Model for Temporal Link Prediction

With the booming development of social media, temporal link prediction (TLP), as a core technology, has been receiving increasing attention. However, current methods are based on graph neural networks, which suffer from the over-smoothing issue and easily yield indistinguishable node representations, degrading the prediction accuracy. Besides, they lack the ability to eliminate noisy temporal information and ignore the importance of high-order neighbor information for measuring the link probability between nodes. To solve these issues, we design a cross-view graph contrastive learning (GCL) framework for TLP, called Tacl. We first design two augmented views for GCL by enhancing the temporal and topological information to obtain distinguishable node representations. Then, we learn the evolution rule of temporal networks to help constrain consistency of node representations and eliminate noise. Finally, we incorporate the high-order neighbor information to measure the link probability between nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of Tacl.