Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning aims to infer future facts at unseen timestamps from temporally evolving entities and relations. Despite recent progress, existing approaches still suffer from inherent limitations due to their inductive biases, as they predominantly rely on time-invariant or weakly time-dependent structures and overlook the evolutionary dynamics. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel collaborative learning framework for TKGR (dubbed CID-TKG) that integrates evolutionary dynamics and historical invariance semantics as an effective inductive bias for reasoning. Specifically, CID-TKG constructs a historical invariance graph to capture long-term structural regularities and an evolutionary dynamics graph to model short-term temporal transitions. Dedicated encoders are then employed to learn representations from each structure. To alleviate semantic discrepancies across the two structures, we decompose relations into view-specific representations and align view-specific query representations via a contrastive objective, which promotes cross-view consistency while suppressing view-specific noise. Extensive experiments verify that our CID-TKG achieves state-of-the-art performance under extrapolation settings.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. An illustrative example of CID-TKG on the ICEWS dataset. The blue region denotes the historical invariance graph, while the green region denotes the evolutionary dynamics graph. Darker colors indicate higher attention scores in both graphs. Illustration of CID-TKG on the ICEWS dataset, showing historical invariance and evolutionary dynamics graphs with attention intensities.
Notations
Descriptions
E,R,T,F
Entity, relation, timestamp, and temporal fact set in a TKG.
Gt
Temporal knowledge graph snapshot at timestamp t .
es,t,rt,eo,t
Subject, relation, and object embeddings at timestamp t .
Et,Rt
Entity and relation embedding matrices at timestamp t .
GD,GI
Evolutionary dynamics and historical invariance graph.
eD,eI
Entity embeddings of both graphs.
Table 1. Summary of Important Notations
Figure 2. Overall architecture of CID-TKG (a). The framework consists of spatio-temporal initialization, relation decomposition (c), a historical invariance graph encoder, and an evolutionary dynamics graph encoder with time-aware attention scores (b), followed by contrastive alignment for collaborative representation learning.
Dataset
Entities ∣E∣
Relations ∣R∣
Training Facts
Validation Facts
Testing Facts
Time granularity
ICEWS14s
6,869
230
74,845
8,514
7,371
24 hours
ICEWS18
23,033
256
373,018
45,995
49,545
24 hours
ICEWS05-15
10,094
251
368,868
46,302
46,159
24 hours
GDELT
7,691
240
1,734,399
238,765
305,241
15 mins
Table 2. Statistics of datasets
Type
Model
ICEWS14s
ICEWS18
ICEWS05-15
GDELT
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@3
Hits@10
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@3
Hits@10
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@3
Hits@10
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@3
Hits@10
♣
TLogic
43.04
33.56
48.27
61.23
29.82
20.54
33.95
48.53
46.97
36.21
53.13
67.43
–
–
–
–
TR-Rules
43.32
33.96
48.55
61.17
30.41
21.10
34.58
48.92
47.64
37.06
53.80
67.57
–
–
–
–
INFER
44.46
35.03
49.37
62.31
32.22
22.39
36.41
51.52
48.73
38.32
54.61
68.48
–
–
–
–
♢
GenTKG
–
36.85
47.95
53.50
–
24.25
37.25
42.10
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
LLM-DA
47.10
36.90
52.60
67.10
–
–
–
–
52.10
41.60
58.60
72.80
–
–
–
–
Table 3. Performance of TKG entity extrapolation on ICEWS14s, ICEWS18, ICEWS05-15 and GDELT. The time-filtered MRR, Hits@1, Hits@3, and Hits@10 metrics are multiplied by 100. The best results are marked in bold and the second results are underlined . We use ♣ , ♢ , and ♠ to denote path-based, LLM-based, and embedding-based methods, respectively.
Variant
ICEWS14s
ICEWS18
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@10
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@10
CID-TKG
51.93
41.49
72.32
38.88
27.66
61.16
-w/o- GD
49.54
38.82
70.00
36.88
25.53
59.40
-w/o- GI
50.29
39.75
70.55
36.98
25.81
58.92
-w/o-(CoA & ReD)
50.96
40.44
71.10
38.42
27.15
60.80
-w/o-CoA
51.37
41.04
71.15
38.62
27.46
60.57
Table 4. Ablation results on ICEWS14s and ICEWS18.
Figure 3. Effect of the upper bound N on the evolutionary dynamics graph. Effect of the upper bound N on the evolutionary dynamics graph.
Figure 4. Effect of the contrastive alignment weight μ . Effect of the contrastive alignment weight μ.
Table 5. Case study of CID-TKG’s entity extrapolation performance on the ICEWS14s dataset. The ground-truth entity is highlighted in bold, and the corresponding prediction scores are provided.
Figure 5. Robustness analysis under Gaussian noise perturbations. Robustness analysis under Gaussian noise perturbations.
Figure 6. Efficiency–performance trade-off comparisons. Efficiency–performance trade-off of different methods.
Variant
ICEWS14s
ICEWS18
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@10
MRR
Hits@1
Hits@10
TTransE
13.72
2.98
35.74
8.31
1.92
21.89
TA-DisMult
25.80
16.94
42.99
16.75
8.61
33.59
DE-simlE
33.36
24.85
49.82
19.30
11.53
34.80
TNTComplEX
34.05
24.85
49.82
21.23
13.28
36.91
ECEformer
34.84
25.60
52.67
26.01
16.67
44.33
Table 6. Additional Comparison with Temporal Modeling Baselines on ICEWS14s and ICEWS18.
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning aims to predict future events from historical facts. A key challenge lies in jointly capturing two sources of predictive information in TKGs: historical evidence and evolutionary dynamics. However, existing methods typically focus on only one of these sources, which limits the ability to fully exploit the complementary predictive signals in TKGs. To address this, we propose CHE-TKG, a novel collaborative dual-view learning framework for TKG reasoning. CHE-TKG explicitly separates and jointly models historical evidence and evolutionary dynamics, aiming to learn and exploit their complementary predictive signals. Specifically, CHE-TKG constructs a historical evidence graph to capture long-term structural regularities and stable relational constraints, alongside an evolutionary dynamics graph to model temporal transitions and recent changes, with dedicated encoders for each view. We further employ relation decomposition and a contrastive alignment objective to better capture the predictive signals across the two views. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CHE-TKG achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.
Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) is essential for predicting future events and time-aware facts. While existing methods are effective at capturing relational dynamics, their performance is limited by a closed-world assumption, which fails to account for emerging entities not present in the training. Notably, these entities continuously join the network without historical interactions. Empirical study reveals that emerging entities are widespread in TKGs, comprising roughly 25% of all entities. The absence of historical interactions of these entities leads to significant performance degradation in reasoning tasks. Whereas, we observe that entities with semantic similarities often exhibit comparable interaction histories, suggesting the presence of transferable temporal patterns. Inspired by this insight, we propose TransFIR (Transferable Inductive Reasoning), a novel framework that leverages historical interaction sequences from semantically similar known entities to support inductive reasoning. Specifically, we propose a codebook-based classifier that categorizes emerging entities into latent semantic clusters, allowing them to adopt reasoning patterns from similar entities. Experimental results demonstrate that TransFIR outperforms all baselines in reasoning on emerging entities, achieving an average improvement of 28.6% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) across multiple datasets. The implementations are available at https://github.com/zhaodazhuang2333/TransFIR.
Ze Zhao, Yuhui He, Lyuwen Wu +6
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · IGSNRR, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) represent time-stamped relational facts and support a wide range of reasoning tasks over evolving events. However, existing methods produce entity representations that are static at the entity level, in that each representation is a function of learned parameters only and retains no trace of the interactions in which the entity has participated. In this paper, we depart from this static view and propose that each entity be modeled as an adaptive process whose representation is refined every time the entity participates in a fact. To this end, we propose AdaTKG, which maintains a per-entity memory that is updated with every observed interaction, with the memory accumulating online and predictions improving as more interactions arrive. Specifically, we instantiate the memory update as a learnable exponential moving average governed by a single shared scalar instead of using learnable parameters for each entity, enabling AdaTKG to handle entities unseen during training. Extensive experiments confirm consistent gains over TKG baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive memory. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/AdaTKG