Violin: Virtual Overbridge Linking for Enhancing Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs with Limited Labels

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is a family of promising tools for graph semi-supervised learning. However, in training, most existing GNNs rely heavily on a large amount of labeled data, which is rare in real-world scenarios. Unlabeled data with useful information are usually under-exploited, which limits the representation power of GNNs. To handle these problems, we propose Virtual Overbridge Linking (Violin), a generic framework to enhance the learning capacity of common GNNs. By learning to add virtual overbridges between two nodes that are estimated to be semantic-consistent, labeled and unlabeled data can be correlated. Supervised information can be well utilized in training while simultaneously inducing the model to learn from unlabeled data. Discriminative relation patterns extracted from unlabeled nodes can also be shared with other nodes even if they are remote from each other. Motivated by recent advances in data augmentations, we additionally integrate Violin with the consistency regularized training. Such a scheme yields node representations with better robustness, which significantly enhances a GNN. Violin can be readily extended to a wide range of GNNs without introducing additional learnable parameters. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that our method is effective and robust under low-label rate scenarios, where Violin can boost some GNNs' performance by over 10% on node classifications.