Papers › ContraNorm: A Contrastive Learning Perspective on Oversmoothing and Beyond

ContraNorm: A Contrastive Learning Perspective on Oversmoothing and Beyond

12 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.06562archive 2025-07-28

Xiaojun Guo, Yifei Wang, Tianqi Du, Yisen Wang

Oversmoothing is a common phenomenon in a wide range of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers, where performance worsens as the number of layers increases. Instead of characterizing oversmoothing from the view of complete collapse in which representations converge to a single point, we dive into a more general perspective of dimensional collapse in which representations lie in a narrow cone. Accordingly, inspired by the effectiveness of contrastive learning in preventing dimensional collapse, we propose a novel normalization layer called ContraNorm. Intuitively, ContraNorm implicitly shatters representations in the embedding space, leading to a more uniform distribution and a slighter dimensional collapse. On the theoretical analysis, we prove that ContraNorm can alleviate both complete collapse and dimensional collapse under certain conditions. Our proposed normalization layer can be easily integrated into GNNs and Transformers with negligible parameter overhead. Experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ContraNorm. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/ContraNorm.

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ContraNorm pku-ml/contranorm/ViT_imagenet/models.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: invariant MIT (permissive) · 09c0ad730c80fc82 · report

Tasks

Contrastive Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Node Property Prediction ogbn-arxiv GIANT-XRT+RevGAT+KD+DCN Ext. data Yes #9 of 86 Archive leaderboard report
Node Property Prediction ogbn-arxiv GIANT-XRT+RevGAT+KD+DCN Number of params 1304912 #9 of 86 Archive leaderboard report
Node Property Prediction ogbn-arxiv GIANT-XRT+RevGAT+KD+DCN Test Accuracy 0.7636 ± 0.0013 #9 of 86 Archive leaderboard report
Node Property Prediction ogbn-arxiv GIANT-XRT+RevGAT+KD+DCN Validation Accuracy 0.7699 ± 0.0002 #9 of 86 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Contrastive Learning

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