Exploring Task Unification in Graph Representation Learning via Generative Approach

Graphs are ubiquitous in real-world scenarios and encompass a diverse range of tasks, from node-, edge-, and graph-level tasks to transfer learning. However, designing specific tasks for each type of graph data is often costly and lacks generalizability. Recent endeavors under the "Pre-training + Fine-tuning" or "Pre-training + Prompt" paradigms aim to design a unified framework capable of generalizing across multiple graph tasks. Among these, graph autoencoders (GAEs), generative self-supervised models, have demonstrated their potential in effectively addressing various graph tasks. Nevertheless, these methods typically employ multi-stage training and require adaptive designs, which on one hand make it difficult to be seamlessly applied to diverse graph tasks and on the other hand overlook the negative impact caused by discrepancies in task objectives between the different stages. To address these challenges, we propose GA²E, a unified adversarially masked autoencoder capable of addressing the above challenges seamlessly. Specifically, GA²E proposes to use the subgraph as the meta-structure, which remains consistent across all graph tasks (ranging from node-, edge-, and graph-level to transfer learning) and all stages (both during training and inference). Further, GA²E operates in a "Generate then Discriminate" manner. It leverages the masked GAE to reconstruct the input subgraph whilst treating it as a generator to compel the reconstructed graphs resemble the input subgraph. Furthermore, GA²E introduces an auxiliary discriminator to discern the authenticity between the reconstructed (generated) subgraph and the input subgraph, thus ensuring the robustness of the graph representation through adversarial training mechanisms. We validate GA²E's capabilities through extensive experiments on 21 datasets across four types of graph tasks.