Multi-Level Graph Contrastive Prototypical Clustering

Abstract

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have drawn a surge of investigations in deep graph clustering. Nevertheless, existing approaches predominantly are inclined to semantic-agnostic since GNNs exhibit inherent limitations in capturing global underlying semantic structures. Meanwhile, multiple objectives are imposed within one latent space, whereas representations from different granularities may presumably conflict with each other, yielding severe performance degradation for clustering. To this end, we propose a novel Multi-Level Graph Contrastive Prototypical Clustering (MLG-CPC) framework for end-to-end clustering. Specifically, a Prototype Discrimination (ProDisc) objective function is proposed to explicitly capture semantic information via cluster assignments. Moreover, to alleviate the issue of objectives conflict, we introduce to perceive representations of different granularities within individual feature-, prototypical-, and cluster-level spaces by the feature decorrelation, prototype contrast, and cluster space consistency respectively. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MLG-CPC against the state-of-the-art graph clustering approaches.