Role-oriented Network Embedding Based on Adversarial Learning between Higher-order and Local Features

Roles of nodes are defined as classes of equivalent nodes. Nodes that have similar local connective patterns may share the same role. As a complementary concept of community, role can also help to recognize real-world entities. For example, it can denote identity or function in social networks. Role has been studied over the past decades, and learning role-based network representations is crucial to many downstream tasks. The important step for role-based network embedding method is extracting features to measure structural similarity instead of proximity. Although some methods have been developed to capture role features to learn structural similarities between nodes, they all design these features of fixed types, such as the global, local, and higher-order features. These features can only represent a certain type of structure, and it is very difficult to model the complex relationship between different scale features in the field of role-based network embedding. Therefore, we propose a novel role-oriented network embedding framework based on adversarial learning between higher-order and local features (ARHOL) to generate powerful role-based node representations. The higher-order features are discrete so we leverage the Auto-Encoder on them to obtain continuous representations. Then we apply the GIN on its outputs to aggregate local information. Finally, we consider the GIN as the generator and design an adversarial game between local features and GIN outputs to integrate these two aspects of features, which can enhance each other and improve the robustness. The extensive experiments on real-world networks demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of our model, and prove the effectiveness of integrating higher-order and local features.