SEAL: Semisupervised Adversarial Active Learning on Attributed Graphs

Active learning (AL) on attributed graphs has received increasing attention with the prevalence of graph-structured data. Although AL has been widely studied for alleviating label sparsity issues with the conventional nonrelational data, how to make it effective over attributed graphs remains an open research question. Existing AL algorithms on node classification attempt to reuse the classic AL query strategies designed for nonrelational data. However, they suffer from two major limitations. First, different AL query strategies calculated in distinct scoring spaces are often naively combined to determine which nodes to be labeled. Second, the AL query engine and the learning of the classifier are treated as two separating processes, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. In this article, we propose a SEmisupervised Adversarial active Learning (SEAL) framework on attributed graphs, which fully leverages the representation power of deep neural networks and devises a novel AL query strategy for node classification in an adversarial way. Our framework learns two adversarial components; a graph embedding network that encodes both the unlabeled and labeled nodes into a common latent space, expecting to trick the discriminator to regard all nodes as already labeled, and a semisupervised discriminator network that distinguishes the unlabeled from the existing labeled nodes. The divergence score, generated by the discriminator in a unified latent space, serves as the informativeness measure to actively select the most informative node to be labeled by an oracle. The two adversarial components form a closed loop to mutually and simultaneously reinforce each other toward enhancing the AL performance. Extensive experiments on real-world networks validate the effectiveness of the SEAL framework with superior performance improvements to state-of-the-art baselines on node classification tasks.