Paper Detail

SAOT: Self-Supervised Continual Graph Learning with Structure-Aware Optimal Transport

Yuting Zhang, Yanbei Liu, Zhitao Xiao, Lei Geng, Yanwei Pang, Xiao Wang

arxiv Score 12.3

Published 2026-07-01 · First seen 2026-07-03

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Self-supervised Continual Graph Learning (CGL) aims to successively learn from a graph sequence with different tasks without label supervision - a paradigm that has attracted widespread attention. Most existing self-supervised CGL methods rely on instance-level consistency objectives that enforce stability of individual node (or node-pair) embeddings. Due to optimizing nodes in isolation, these methods fail to maintain global relational structure, causing inter-node correspondences to progressively distort under continual learning. To this end, we propose a novel Structure-Aware Optimal Transport (SAOT) framework that explicitly captures and preserves relational structure within graph representations across sequential tasks. Specifically, SAOT leverages optimal transport theory to capture global inter-node correspondences, thereby facilitating and enhancing graph representation learning. Simultaneously, SAOT incorporates a cross-task knowledge distillation mechanism to preserve the previous structural knowledge. Extensive experiments on four CGL benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAOT outperforms existing self-supervised baselines. In particular, SAOT achieves significant performance gains, improving average accuracy by up to 5% on CoraFull-CL and over 15% on Products-CL compared with state-of-the-art methods in the Class-IL setting.

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BibTeX

@article{zhang2026saot,
  title = {SAOT: Self-Supervised Continual Graph Learning with Structure-Aware Optimal Transport},
  author = {Yuting Zhang and Yanbei Liu and Zhitao Xiao and Lei Geng and Yanwei Pang and Xiao Wang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Self-supervised Continual Graph Learning (CGL) aims to successively learn from a graph sequence with different tasks without label supervision - a paradigm that has attracted widespread attention. Most existing self-supervised CGL methods rely on instance-level consistency objectives that enforce stability of individual node (or node-pair) embeddings. Due to optimizing nodes in isolation, these methods fail to maintain global relational structure, causing inter-node correspondences to progressiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00377},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.SI},
  eprint = {2607.00377},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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