Temporal signed networks (TSNs) model the time evolution of cooperative and adversarial relationships that arise in applications such as social media analysis, trust and reputation systems, and financial transaction networks. While graph neural networks (GNNs) perform well for static or unsigned link prediction, effective learning in temporal signed graphs remains challenging due to the interaction of signed relations, evolving structure, and balance-theoretic constraints. To address this gap, we propose a \emph{modular} temporal enhancement framework for signed GNNs that integrates historical context into otherwise static architectures. The framework introduces a Historical Context Integration Module (HCIM) that combines learnable recency-aware temporal weighting, LSTM-based embedding trajectory modeling, and multi-head temporal attention to capture both short- and long-term signed interaction dynamics. Historical information is fused with current node representations using either global or node-adaptive weighting, allowing the architecture-agnostic framework to accommodate heterogeneous temporal behaviors. We instantiate the approach on the Self-Explainable Signed Graph Transformer (SE-SGformer), preserving interpretability while extending it with temporal awareness. Experiments on real-world and synthetic TSNs, including Bitcoin OTC, Bitcoin Alpha, Reddit, and small-world network models, demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the static baseline.
Predicting links in sparse, continuously evolving networks is a central challenge in network science. Conventional heuristic methods and deep learning models, including Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are typically designed for static graphs and thus struggle to capture temporal dependencies. Snapshot-based techniques partially address this issue but often encounter data sparsity and class imbalance, particularly in networks with transient interactions such as telecommunication call detail records (CDRs). Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) model dynamic graphs by updating node embeddings over time; however, their predictive accuracy under sparse conditions remains limited. In this study, we improve the TGN framework by extracting enclosing subgraphs around candidate links, enabling the model to jointly learn structural and temporal information. Experiments on a sparse CDR, email, message dataset show that our approach increases average precision by at least 2% over standard TGNs, demonstrating the advantages of integrating local topology for robust link prediction in dynamic networks.
Real temporal interaction streams carry predictive structure in short-horizon motif patterns -- repetition, reciprocity, star diversity, triadic flow -- that vanilla temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) often fail to expose to their edge scorers. We show this concretely on MOOC interaction prediction, where a small four-feature family of past-window star counts already delivers most of the lift over a strong static GNN. Across a wide set of real and synthetic temporal datasets we find that motif activity organizes consistently along three scale-stable axes (dyadic recency/reciprocity, star diversity, triadic flow), and we use this empirical structure to design a compact 13-coordinate, leakage-safe, candidate-local motif feature map h(u, v, t) that linearly embeds into any static or temporal encoder without architectural changes. A temporal Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) analysis places the augmentation relative to the first level of an anchored temporal-WL hierarchy and exhibits a candidate-anchored pair on which motif features distinguish. We demonstrate empirically that the same augmentation consistently lifts performance across heterogeneous tasks: TGB link-property prediction across all five baselines, edge classification on Bitcoin Alpha/OTC and MOOC, and graph-level classification of synthetic temporal generators.
Aggregating temporal signals from historic interactions is a key step in future link prediction on dynamic graphs. However, incorporating long histories is resource-intensive. Hence, temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) often rely on historical neighbors sampling heuristics such as uniform sampling or recent neighbors selection. These heuristics are static and fail to adapt to the underlying graph structure. We introduce FLASH, a learnable and graph-adaptive neighborhood selection mechanism that generalizes existing heuristics. FLASH integrates seamlessly into TGNNs and is trained end-to-end using a self-supervised ranking loss. We provide theoretical evidence that commonly used heuristics hinder TGNNs performance, motivating our design. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent and significant performance improvements for TGNNs equipped with FLASH.
Or Feldman, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb +2