English

ASPECT: Node-Level Adaptive Spectral Fusion for Graph Contrastive Learning

Machine Learning 2026-05-11 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Spectral graph contrastive learning often constructs low- and high-frequency views to capture complementary graph signals, but these views are commonly combined by graph-level or node-agnostic fusion rules. We show that graph-level fusion can incur irreducible regret on mixed graphs with separated node-wise spectral preferences. Motivated by this result, we propose ASPECT, a spectral graph contrastive learning method that adaptively fuses low- and high-frequency views at the node level. ASPECT learns a node-wise spectral policy and regularizes it using channel-wise contrastive evidence, enabling different nodes to use different spectral mixtures. We further introduce ASPECT-S, an optional stability-aware extension that uses generated graph-structure and feature perturbations to obtain empirical channel-wise sensitivity estimates, together with a Rayleigh-based spectral search bias for producing informative perturbations. Experiments on homophilic and heterophilic benchmarks show that ASPECT improves representation quality over competitive spectral and graph contrastive baselines, while ASPECT-S further improves performance under joint graph-structure and feature perturbations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.01878,
  title  = {ASPECT: Node-Level Adaptive Spectral Fusion for Graph Contrastive Learning},
  author = {Zhuolong Li and Boxue Yang and Haopeng Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01878},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 3 figures. Revised version with updated method framing, improved exposition, and additional experiments

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:50:45.530Z