Efficient and Scalable Multi-View Masked Autoencoder for Heterogeneous Graph Self-Supervised Learning

Hao Geng, Deqing Wang, Lihao Ge, Chenguang Du, Fuzhen Zhuang +3

Recent years have witnessed the flourishing of self-supervised learning on heterogeneous graphs, e.g., masked autoencoder-based methods. However, existing methods suffer from three issues, including the prohibitive computational cost of constructing meta-path-induced subgraphs, the limitations of uniform random masking, and the suboptimal objective of reconstructing potentially noisy or uninformative original node features. To address these issues, we propose the Multi-View Masked Auto Encoder (MVMAE), a novel, efficient, and scalable framework for heterogeneous graph self-supervised learning. First, MVMAE introduces a novel multi-view mask-then-reconstruct strategy. Instead of masking individual nodes or features, MVMAE randomly masks entire meta-path views and guides the model to reconstruct their representations from remaining visible views. This approach shifts the learning objective to a high-level and semantic task, providing a more robust and informative supervisory signal that is effective even when initial node features are absent or flawed. Then, to handle the computational demands, MVMAE employs an efficient offline aggregation mechanism that pre-computes and reuses…