{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/uncovering-the-structural-fairness-in-graph","title":"Uncovering the Structural Fairness in Graph Contrastive Learning","arxiv_id":"2210.03011","date":"2022-10-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ruijia Wang","Xiao Wang","Chuan Shi","Le Song"],"abstract":"Recent studies show that graph convolutional network (GCN) often performs worse for low-degree nodes, exhibiting the so-called structural unfairness for graphs with long-tailed degree distributions prevalent in the real world. Graph contrastive learning (GCL), which marries the power of GCN and contrastive learning, has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach for learning node representations. How does GCL behave in terms of structural fairness? Surprisingly, we find that representations obtained by GCL methods are already fairer to degree bias than those learned by GCN. We theoretically show that this fairness stems from intra-community concentration and inter-community scatter properties of GCL, resulting in a much clear community structure to drive low-degree nodes away from the community boundary. Based on our theoretical analysis, we further devise a novel graph augmentation method, called GRAph contrastive learning for DEgree bias (GRADE), which applies different strategies to low- and high-degree nodes. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and evaluation protocols validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03011v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.03011v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"uncovering-the-structural-fairness-in-graph","repo_url":"https://github.com/bupt-gamma/uncovering-the-structural-fairness-in-graph-contrastive-learning","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"method_slug":"gcn","method_name":"GCN"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.03011","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2210.03011"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/bupt-gamma/uncovering-the-structural-fairness-in-graph-contrastive-learning","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"listed":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"8e4c33cd4591971c","entry":"get_node_dist","repo":"bupt-gamma/uncovering-the-structural-fairness-in-graph-contrastive-learning","repo_kind":"listed","path":"code/aug.py","file_url":"https://github.com/bupt-gamma/uncovering-the-structural-fairness-in-graph-contrastive-learning/blob/HEAD/code/aug.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"8e4c33cd4591971c"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}