Unsupervised multiplex graph diffusion networks with multi-level canonical correlation analysis for multiplex graph representation learning

In recent years, unsupervised multiplex graph representation learning (UMGRL) has received increasing research interest, which aims to learn discriminative node features from the multiplex graphs supervised by data without the guidance of labels. Although these designed UMGRL methods have obtained great success in various graph-related tasks, most existing UMGRL models still have the following issues: highly depending on complex self-supervised strategies (i.e., data augmentation, pretext tasks, and negative pairs sampling), restricted receptive fields, and only aggregating low-frequency information between nodes. In this paper, we propose a simple unsupervised multiplex graph diffusion network (UMGDN) with the aid of multi-level canonical correlation analysis to solve the above issues. Specifically, we first decouple the feature transform and propagation processes of the graph convolution layer to further improve the generalization of the learnable parameters. And then, we propose adaptive diffusion propagation to capture long-range dependency relationships between nodes, not the local neighborhood interactions. Finally, a multi-level canonical correlation analysis loss on both the feature transform and propagation processes is proposed to maximize the correlation of the same node features from multiple graphs for guiding model optimization. Compared to the existing UMGRL models, our proposed UMGDN does not need to introduce any data augmentation, negative pairs sampling techniques, complex pretext tasks, and also adaptively aggregates the optimal frequency information between nodes to generate more robust node embeddings. Extensive experiments on four popular datasets and two graph-related tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.