Attributed Graph Clustering with Multi-Scale Weight-Based Pairwise Coarsening and Contrastive Learning

Abstract

This study introduces the Multi-Scale Weight-Based Pairwise Coarsening and Contrastive Learning (MPCCL) model, a novel approach for attributed graph clustering that effectively bridges critical gaps in existing methods, including long-range dependency, feature collapse, and information loss. Traditional methods often struggle to capture high-order graph features due to their reliance on low-order attribute information, while contrastive learning techniques face limitations in feature diversity by overemphasizing local neighborhood structures. Similarly, conventional graph coarsening methods, though reducing graph scale, frequently lose fine-grained structural details. MPCCL addresses these challenges through an innovative multi-scale coarsening strategy, which progressively condenses the graph while prioritizing the merging of key edges based on global node similarity to preserve essential structural information. It further introduces a one-to-many contrastive learning paradigm, integrating node embeddings with augmented graph views and cluster centroids to enhance feature diversity, while mitigating feature masking issues caused by the accumulation of high-frequency node weights during multi-scale coarsening. By incorporating a graph reconstruction loss and KL divergence into its self-supervised learning framework, MPCCL ensures cross-scale consistency of node representations. Experimental evaluations reveal that MPCCL achieves a significant improvement in clustering performance, including a remarkable 15.24% increase in NMI on the ACM dataset and notable robust gains on smaller-scale datasets such as Citeseer, Cora and DBLP.