“…Over the last few years, the overall effectiveness of the GAE and VGAE paradigms at addressing link prediction has been widely confirmed experimentally [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,24,27,28,51,52,53]. Numerous research efforts proposed and evaluated variants of GAE and VGAE designed for this specific task, improving their performances by considering more refined encoders [17,21,51,54], decoders [18,20,21,22] or regularization techniques [15,19,28]. Other works also successfully addressed different downstream tasks that are closely related to link prediction, such as edge classification [52] or graph-based recommendation [51,53,55].…”