TKGB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting
Authors: Jiasheng Zhang, Zhengpin Li, Hao Li, Jie Shao, Hui Li, Jiangtao Cui
Organizations: Xidian University, China, Xi’an · Peking University, China, Peking · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China, Chengdu · XI’AN University of Posts&Telecommunications, China, Xi’an
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting has advanced remarkably in recent years. Yet we found existing benchmarks inadvertently introduce a shortcut: For a subset of test queries, models can achieve optimal evaluation metrics without using any time information. We trace this to two pieces of evidence: inherent dataset biases and an overly simplistic task formulation that allows models to exploit biases, revealing fundamental flaws in current evaluation protocols for differentiating true forecasting ability. Moreover, existing datasets rely on fixed history that poorly reflects real-world dynamics, lack semantic context, and fail to explicitly mitigate shortcut, preventing thorough assessment of forecasting abilities. To address these, we propose TKGB, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the capability of TKG forecasting models. By integrating four complementary tasks with an automatic pipeline for constructing up-to-date and context-enriched TKG datasets with controllable shortcuts, TKGB reveals capability differences and failure modes hidden under conventional evaluation.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Co-occurrence vs. a recent supervised model on existing TKG forecasting benchmarks.
Figure 2: (a) Historical candidate-set size distributions. Each segment shows the percentage of test queries within a size bin of O(s,r) . (b) Hits@10 and Hits@1 performance across query subsets. All denotes the complete test set. o∈O(s,r)∧∣O(s,r)∣≤10 identifies queries whose answers belong to a historical set of at most 10 objects. Other denotes the remaining queries.
Figure 3: TKGB benchmarking tasks.
Data
Ent.
Rel.
T.
Tr.
Val.
Test.
Desc.
Int.
Pol.-D
5,873
343
5.4K
881K
9.3K
512K
99.8%
8.7K
Pol.-M
5,972
349
180
690K
7.1K
368K
99.8%
8.8K
Pol.-Y
7,466
380
15
467K
7.5K
233K
99.7%
11.7K
Fin.-D
8,186
361
5.4K
2.00M
16.2K
1.95M
99.9%
13.7K
Fin.-M
8,476
366
180
1.50M
9.7K
1.18M
99.8%
14.0K
Fin.-Y
11,226
399
15
925K
11.2K
656K
99.7%
19.0K
Table 1: Dataset statistics. T. denotes timestamps; Desc. denotes the proportion of facts whose two entities both have descriptions. Int. denotes unique interval facts.
Figure 4: Entity activation estimation results. Each panel reports ROC-AUC for distinguishing active entities from hard inactive entities. Co-occur. denotes the proposed co-occurrence-based scoring strategy.
Data
Co-occur.
DE
TNT
TCompoundE
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
.041/.371
.000/.018
.000/.000
.000/.000
.029/.252
.083/.331
.029/.087
.354/.795
.329/.468
.343/.690
Fin.-M
.048/.251
.000/.003
.000/.002
.000/.000
.043/.261
.014/.177
.019/.080
.292/.625
.177/.253
.256/.525
Fin.-Y
.029/.192
.000/.000
.010/.010
.000/.000
.029/.094
.032/.155
.017/.059
.162/.447
.031/.071
.139/.431
Med.-D
.040/.337
.000/.003
.000/.000
.000/.000
.028/.296
.066/.301
.028/.077
.377/.668
.338/.430
.378/.636
Med.-M
.031/.263
.000/.000
.000/.000
.000/.000
.015/.121
.039/.246
.006/.061
.289/.635
.149/.209
.219/.537
Med.-Y
.040/.163
.000/.000
.013/.024
.000/.013
.004/.047
.018/.105
.011/.043
.151/.425
.043/.079
.133/.408
Table 2: Knowledge generation results. Each cell reports Recall@100 and Recall@1000. Best and second-best results are marked by bold and underline, ranked by Recall@100.
Figure 5: Left: statistics of the top-10 generated facts by different models on the Politics-Day dataset. Right: mean historical frequency of the generated object entities.
Dataset
TNT
RE-GCN
CognTKE
INFER
ExE-LLM
Fin.-D
.308/.392
.070/.008
.051/.006
.324/.306
.081/.047
Fin.-M
.331/.277
.045/.045
.095/.006
.385/.255
.127/.039
Fin.-Y
.229/.223
.007/.002
.120/.013
.316/.324
.107/.044
Pol.-D
.634/.726
.006/.000
.030/.004
.422/.342
.047/.015
Pol.-M
.402/.634
.001/.000
.061/.007
.322/.360
.068/.015
Pol.-Y
.323/.420
.001/.000
.148/.063
.269/.308
.042/.018
Table 3: Knowledge obsolescence recognition results. Each cell is Hits@10 for valid and obsolete objects.
Dataset
Co-occur.
RE-GCN
CognTKE
INFER
G2S
Fin.-D
.248/.479
.223/.436
.492/.761
.396/.573
.154/.323
Fin.-M
.175/.360
.158/.344
.157/.331
.257/.431
.125/.278
Fin.-Y
.144/.270
.063/.145
.150/.305
.160/.314
.093/.235
Pol.-D
.233/.448
.199/.392
.468/.723
.312/.547
.162/.360
Pol.-M
.189/.378
.169/.371
.203/.404
.242/.456
.117/.290
Pol.-Y
.149/.287
.049/.077
.154/.318
.164/.335
.086/.212
Table 4: Standard TKG forecasting results. Each cell reports Hits@10 after and before shortcut filtering.
Dataset
Co-occur.
DE
TNT
TCompoundE
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
.031/.035
.034/.053
.033/.051
.008/.013
.040/.080
.441/.681
.073/.136
.121/.193
.049/.135
.042/.061
Fin.-M
.030/.044
.035/.066
.035/.072
.004/.005
.044/.095
.060/.125
.046/.112
.089/.143
.046/.097
.047/.075
Fin.-Y
.042/.080
.048/.100
.042/.092
.005/.006
.040/.087
.049/.103
.062/.134
.055/.113
.036/.095
.038/.060
Med.-D
.030/.036
.035/.053
.034/.054
.006/.009
.042/.088
.449/.690
.067/.134
.115/.184
.045/.105
.040/.075
Med.-M
.030/.044
.035/.067
.034/.065
.003/.003
.043/.099
.058/.126
.049/.117
.085/.135
.036/.083
.044/.067
Med.-Y
.040/.076
.046/.095
.040/.086
.005/.006
.046/.109
.045/.100
.057/.124
.054/.111
.041/.096
.042/.063
Table 5: Rare knowledge forecasting results. Each cell reports MRR and Hits@10 under time-filtered ranking.
Dataset
Co-occur.
DE
TNT
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
0.029/0.264
0.000/0.008
0.000/0.000
0.081/0.248
0.070/0.256
0.034/0.137
0.197/0.515
0.142/0.294
0.196/0.542
Fin.-M
0.026/0.211
0.000/0.003
0.000/0.002
0.021/0.184
0.027/0.182
0.020/0.096
0.186/0.436
0.131/0.228
0.200/0.510
Med.-D
0.065/0.297
0.000/0.004
0.000/0.000
0.051/0.222
0.052/0.310
0.026/0.109
0.250/0.606
0.244/0.365
0.322/0.617
Med.-M
0.026/0.263
0.000/0.000
0.000/0.000
0.008/0.081
0.050/0.258
0.019/0.090
0.235/0.517
0.149/0.251
0.249/0.571
Pol.-D
0.013/0.238
0.000/0.003
0.000/0.000
0.047/0.198
0.048/0.266
0.002/0.122
0.175/0.381
0.129/0.203
0.196/0.464
Pol.-M
0.027/0.138
0.000/0.000
0.000/0.000
0.003/0.004
0.045/0.177
0.008/0.128
0.122/0.308
0.043/0.074
0.160/0.404
Table 6: Online knowledge generation results. Each cell reports Recall@100 and Recall@1000. Best and second-best results are marked in bold and underline, ranked by Recall@100.
Figure 6: Each cell reports knowledge generation performance before and after integrating interval facts.
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 7: Diversity distributions of TKGB datasets. Each subplot shows the distribution of historical subject-relation preference set sizes ∣O(s,r)∣ over test facts. Bars denote the proportion of test facts falling into each preference-size bin, and the black dashed curve denotes the average distribution of existing TKG benchmarks.
Domain
Audited entities
Entity alignment accuracy
Domain label accuracy
Description accuracy
Politics
2000
0.998
1.0
0.986
Finance
2000
0.997
0.995
0.989
Media
2000
0.998
1.0
0.992
Overall
6000
0.997
0.998
0.989
Appendix
Table 7: Human audit of the entity-level annotation quality of the constructed datasets.
Data
Ent.
Rel.
Trans.
Ind.
Desc.
Pol.-D online testing
5,873
207
64.2K
4.7K
99.8%
Pol.-M online testing
5,972
207
46.7K
4.0K
99.8%
Fin.-D online testing
8,186
203
56.1K
3.6K
100.0%
Fin.-M online testing
8,476
203
38.4K
2.9K
100.0%
Med.-D online testing
8,274
205
59.4K
3.0K
100.0%
Med.-M online testing
8,564
205
41.0K
2.3K
100.0%
Appendix
Table 8: Online testing set statistics. Trans. denotes transductive facts whose entities are both seen during training. Ind. denotes candidate online event facts involving at least one entity unseen in offline training. Desc. denotes the proportion of Test. facts whose two entities both have textual descriptions.
Figure 8: Entity activation estimation results on all datasets. Each cell reports ROC-AUC for distinguishing active entities from inactive entities. Top-10 and Top-100 denote activation scores aggregated from the highest-scoring 10 and 100 generated facts, respectively.
Dataset
Co-occur.
DE
TNT
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
0.643/0.738
0.398/0.683
0.104/0.316
0.571/0.671
0.626/0.736
0.317/0.493
0.898/0.924
0.584/0.709
0.874/0.942
Fin.-M
0.490/0.621
0.184/0.491
0.076/0.150
0.552/0.682
0.513/0.658
0.275/0.441
0.783/0.830
0.373/0.498
0.793/0.873
Fin.-Y
0.418/0.543
0.067/0.282
0.013/0.019
0.264/0.355
0.338/0.421
0.227/0.380
0.602/0.668
0.168/0.288
0.678/0.781
Med.-D
0.620/0.719
0.250/0.577
0.044/0.143
0.571/0.672
0.583/0.707
0.343/0.532
0.869/0.916
0.482/0.650
0.809/0.858
Med.-M
0.513/0.613
0.058/0.318
0.029/0.114
0.400/0.547
0.507/0.672
0.261/0.488
0.779/0.823
0.288/0.430
0.789/0.857
Med.-Y
0.385/0.509
0.061/0.287
0.030/0.045
0.162/0.228
0.268/0.369
0.218/0.380
0.619/0.677
0.156/0.300
0.657/0.758
Appendix
Table 9: Knowledge generation results on all nine datasets. Each cell reports Recall@5000 and Recall@10000. Best and second-best results are marked in bold and underline, ranked by Recall@5000.
Dataset
Co-occur.
DE
TNT
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
0.072/0.011
0.266/0.320
0.308/0.392
0.070/0.008
0.051/0.006
0.049/0.000
0.324/0.306
0.081/0.047
0.058/0.006
Fin.-M
0.112/0.014
0.329/0.314
0.331/0.277
0.045/0.045
0.095/0.006
0.127/0.041
0.385/0.255
0.127/0.039
0.094/0.008
Fin.-Y
0.060/0.012
0.232/0.254
0.229/0.223
0.007/0.002
0.120/0.013
0.130/0.049
0.316/0.324
0.107/0.044
0.037/0.003
Med.-D
0.079/0.012
0.310/0.354
0.324/0.381
0.062/0.008
0.095/0.005
0.049/0.000
0.309/0.309
0.081/0.059
0.067/0.018
Med.-M
0.107/0.009
0.336/0.361
0.376/0.367
0.072/0.008
0.093/0.007
0.119/0.040
0.371/0.238
0.104/0.025
0.091/0.011
Med.-Y
0.062/0.011
0.257/0.272
0.246/0.256
0.027/0.002
0.147/0.041
0.138/0.054
0.297/0.300
0.093/0.044
0.059/0.006
Appendix
Table 10: Knowledge obsolescence recognition results on all TKGB datasets. Each cell reports Valid-Hits@10 and Obs-Hits@10. Valid-Hits@10 measures whether still-valid interval objects are retained in the top-10 predictions, while Obs-Hits@10 measures whether obsolete objects are incorrectly ranked in the top-10. Higher Valid-Hits@10 and lower Obs-Hits@10 indicate better obsolescence-aware forecasting. Query interval facts are held out from the temporal context.
Dataset
Co-occur.
DE
TNT
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
0.040/0.007
0.128/0.173
0.150/0.179
0.039/0.007
0.037/0.002
0.027/0.001
0.215/0.215
0.048/0.023
0.036/0.005
Fin.-M
0.059/0.006
0.143/0.161
0.163/0.140
0.023/0.020
0.047/0.005
0.069/0.012
0.237/0.152
0.079/0.021
0.062/0.005
Fin.-Y
0.037/0.004
0.100/0.122
0.099/0.096
0.004/0.001
0.059/0.008
0.057/0.021
0.170/0.194
0.058/0.017
0.025/0.002
Med.-D
0.038/0.007
0.149/0.194
0.170/0.185
0.028/0.006
0.051/0.002
0.027/0.001
0.202/0.213
0.046/0.025
0.033/0.011
Med.-M
0.051/0.006
0.152/0.190
0.181/0.173
0.033/0.004
0.055/0.005
0.056/0.019
0.214/0.140
0.077/0.021
0.048/0.005
Med.-Y
0.039/0.004
0.109/0.130
0.114/0.107
0.012/0.001
0.079/0.016
0.057/0.022
0.165/0.165
0.050/0.017
0.035/0.003
Appendix
Table 11: Knowledge obsolescence recognition results on all nine datasets. Each cell reports Valid-MRR/Obs-MRR. Valid-MRR measures whether still-valid interval objects are ranked high, while Obs-MRR measures whether obsolete objects are incorrectly ranked high. Higher Valid-MRR and lower Obs-MRR are preferred.
Dataset
DE
TNT
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
0.001/0.003
0.000/0.002
0.003/0.010
0.330/0.464
0.035/0.056
0.074/0.092
0.000/0.037
0.008/0.016
Fin.-M
0.001/0.005
0.001/0.006
0.005/0.019
0.016/0.040
0.007/0.027
0.048/0.059
0.011/0.032
0.014/0.032
Fin.-Y
0.008/0.027
0.007/0.025
0.014/0.027
0.010/0.027
0.019/0.052
0.015/0.030
0.003/0.022
0.006/0.025
Med.-D
0.001/0.005
0.001/0.003
0.004/0.015
0.336/0.475
0.027/0.052
0.069/0.085
0.009/0.026
0.004/0.013
Med.-M
0.001/0.005
0.001/0.005
0.006/0.021
0.009/0.048
0.009/0.034
0.045/0.055
0.003/0.023
0.010/0.027
Med.-Y
0.008/0.024
0.007/0.023
0.010/0.032
0.007/0.023
0.015/0.048
0.015/0.031
0.006/0.027
0.012/0.024
Appendix
Table 12: Rare knowledge forecasting results. Each cell reports Hits@1 and Hits@3, and the best results are highlighted according to Hits@1.
Dataset
Co-occur.
DE
TNT
RE-GCN
CognTKE
TLogic
INFER
ExE-LLM
G2S
Fin.-D
0.500/0.500
0.453/0.481
0.388/0.398
0.437/0.424
0.891/0.891
0.500/0.526
0.356/0.357
0.629/0.629
0.609/0.605
Fin.-M
0.500/0.500
0.424/0.429
0.399/0.394
0.376/0.375
0.394/0.393
0.500/0.560
0.381/0.524
0.669/0.669
0.615/0.621
Med.-D
0.500/0.500
0.415/0.415
0.393/0.399
0.573/0.548
0.924/0.924
0.500/0.528
0.394/0.364
0.555/0.555
0.533/0.529
Med.-M
0.500/0.500
0.470/0.482
0.381/0.385
0.457/0.466
0.454/0.448
0.500/0.597
0.425/0.542
0.612/0.612
0.549/0.551
Pol.-D
0.500/0.500
0.483/0.482
0.417/0.410
0.550/0.526
0.790/0.788
0.500/0.532
0.474/0.476
0.513/0.513
0.507/0.507
Pol.-M
0.500/0.500
0.447/0.446
0.384/0.384
0.471/0.479
0.572/0.571
0.500/0.551
0.397/0.432
0.624/0.624
0.564/0.565
Appendix
Table 13: Online entity activation results. Each cell reports AUC for distinguishing active entities using the activation scores aggregated from the highest-scoring 10 and 100 generated facts. Best and second-best results are marked in bold and underline.
Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) represent evolving relational systems, whose underlying data-generating processes often change over time. Yet, TKG forecasting models are commonly evaluated only on empirical benchmark datasets that provide limited insight into the models' robustness to such distribution shifts. Recognising this issue, we study TKG forecasting under controlled shift environments using a synthetic TKG generator that encodes three temporal and structural properties -- recurrence, homophily, and periodicity -- as data-generating mechanisms. This allows us to evaluate seven forecasting architectures under stationary and shifting regimes. Our experiments suggest that robustness in TKG forecasting is highly signal-dependent. Recurrence-based and periodic regularities are largely recoverable under stationary conditions, and simple memory-based baselines can be competitive when recurrence dominates the data. However, structural breaks reveal limitations in model adaptivity, with shifts in latent entity-community structure posing the strongest challenge in our study. Overall, our findings improve the understanding of the capabilities and limitations of current TKG models confronted with temporal distribution shifts.
Konrad Özdemir, Julia Gastinger, Lukas Kirchdorfer +1
Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim, Germany · SAP Signavio, Walldorf, Germany
Foundation models have transformed natural language processing and computer vision, and a rapidly growing literature on time-series foundation models (TSFMs) seeks to replicate this success in forecasting. While recent open-source models demonstrate the promise of TSFMs, the field lacks a comprehensive and community-accepted model evaluation framework. We see at least four major issues impeding progress on the development of such a framework. First, existing evaluation frameworks comprise benchmark forecasting tasks derived from often outdated datasets (e.g., M3), many of which lack clear metadata and overlap with the corpora used to pre-train TSFMs. Second, these frameworks evaluate models along a narrowly defined set of benchmark forecasting tasks, such as forecast horizon length or domain, but overlook core statistical properties such as non-stationarity and seasonality. Third, domain-specific models (e.g., XGBoost) are often compared unfairly, as existing frameworks do not enforce a systematic and consistent hyperparameter tuning convention for all models. Fourth, visualization tools for interpreting comparative performance are lacking. To address these issues, we introduce TempusBench, an open-source evaluation framework for TSFMs. TempusBench consists of 1) new datasets which are not included in existing TSFM pretraining corpora, 2) a set of novel benchmark tasks that go beyond existing ones, 3) a model evaluation pipeline with a standardized hyperparameter tuning protocol, and 4) a tensorboard-based visualization interface. We provide access to our code on GitHub: https://github.com/Smlcrm/TempusBench and maintain a live leaderboard at https://smlcrm.com/tempusbench.
Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) record how facts evolve over time, but forecasting future events on a TKG remains difficult for three reasons: (i) long-range temporal dependencies are hard to encode; (ii) events on different chains mutually excite or inhibit one another in ways that snapshot-level models cannot express; and (iii) inter-arrival times are heavy-tailed and statistically sparse, so deterministic time predictors are unreliable. We address these three issues with a single framework, the Group Attention Neural Hawkes Process (GAttNHP), built around three matched components. First, a self-attention encoder casts each subject--relation chain as a continuous-time point process and captures the lingering excitation of distant history. Second, a semantic soft-grouping module turns globally learnable Hawkes priors into an analytical cross-attention mask, so chains share excitation patterns through their latent group memberships rather than through exhaustive pairwise computation. Third, a Non-Crossing Quantile (NCQ) regression head replaces mean-based time prediction, providing calibrated, monotonically ordered quantile estimates that remain stable under heavy-tailed inter-arrival distributions. On six benchmark TKG datasets, GAttNHP improves over state-of-the-art baselines on both entity prediction and time prediction, and ablations confirm that its largest gains arise on the long-tail event chains where existing models fail most severely.
Xiangni Tian, Kaixian Yu, Runpeng Dai +2
Yunnan Key Laboratory of Statistical Modeling and Data Analysis, Yunnan University, Kunming, China · Insilicom LLC, Peabody, MA, USA · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA