Enhancing Distance-Based Graph Autoencoders with Structural Penalties for Dynamic Graph Embedding

Abstract

Graph autoencoders (GAEs) are widely used for learning representations of dynamic graphs. However, their optimisation objectives typically do not take structural heterogeneity across nodes into account. We propose three distance-based GAE variants that incorporate structural penalties into the reconstruction loss. All variants share a two-layer Graph Convolutional Network encoder and a Euclidean-distance decoder trained with distance-based reconstruction objectives. We extend sparsity-corrected loss with two node-level regularization terms: (i) a hub penalty based on degree centrality, and (ii) a penalty based on Natural Community Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (NC-LID). The paper is motivated by prior evidence linking high NC-LID to reduced embedding quality. The proposed methods are designed to emphasize reconstruction errors for structurally ambiguous nodes. Experiments on multiple dynamic graph data sets show that incorporating NC-LID-based regularization consistently improves reconstruction performance over the baseline without structural regularization and the method using hub-aware regularization. These findings highlight NC-LID as a useful structural signal for enhancing distance-based graph autoencoders in dynamic settings.