Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA) requires reasoning over time-sensitive facts, yet existing embedding-based methods struggle with multi-step queries due to single-pass reasoning pipelines. We propose SABET-QA, a framework that iteratively refines reasoning states across multiple hops via a bidirectional entity-temporal scoring mechanism and a slot-aware contextualization module that aligns question semantics with temporal KG embeddings. A differentiable working memory enables progressive hypothesis refinement, while auxiliary temporal boundaries serve as coarse supervision when available. Experiments on CronQuestions, Complex-CronQuestions, MultiTQ, and TimeQuestions demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly on complex multi-step temporal queries.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Impact of the number of reasoning hops on Complex-CronQuestions. Left: Hits@1 for different question categories. Right: overall test Hits@1 and Hits@10.
Model
Entity Contextualization
Bidirectional Entity & Time Scoring
Hard Supervision
Complex-CronQuestions
Hits@1
Hits@10
SABET-QA-Hard
✓
✓
✓
0.807
0.962
✗
✓
✓
0.707
0.946
✓
✗
✓
0.659
0.849
✓
✓
✗
0.524
0.896
Table 1: Ablation study of SABET-QA-Hard on the Complex-CronQuestions test set. Removing any component degrades performance, with the largest drop observed when bidirectional entity and time scoring is disabled.
Model
Frozen LM
Frozen TKE
Complex-CronQuestions
CronQuestions
Hits@1
Hits@10
Hits@1
Hits@10
SABET-QA
✓
✓
0.524
0.896
0.843
0.969
✓
✗
0.446
0.871
0.773
0.950
✗
✓
0.547
0.892
0.836
0.968
✗
✗
0.476
0.882
0.784
0.946
SABET-QA-Hard
✓
✓
0.807
0.962
0.954
0.989
Table 2: Ablation study evaluating the impact of freezing the language model (LM) and temporal knowledge graph embedding (TKE) modules under both no supervision ( SABET-QA ) and hard supervision ( SABET-QA-Hard ). The comparison isolates the contribution of each component and demonstrates the effect of unfreezing the parameters on overall reasoning performance.
Model
Hits@1
Hits@10
Overall
Complex
Simple
Entity
Time
Overall
Complex
Simple
Entity
Time
BERT
0.257
0.253
0.262
0.292
0.191
0.642
0.617
0.676
0.650
0.627
CronKGQA
0.646
0.391
0.987
0.698
0.550
0.886
0.806
0.993
0.901
0.858
EmbedKGQA
0.433
0.370
0.516
0.576
0.166
0.787
0.735
0.857
0.892
0.592
TempoQR
0.796
0.658
0.981
0.880
0.640
0.959
0.934
0.992
0.975
0.930
TempoQR-Hard
0.914
0.861
0.984
0.923
0.896
0.979
0.968
0.993
0.982
0.973
Table 3: Comparison against other methods on the CronQuestions test set. Metrics are reported for overall performance, question type (complex/simple), and answer type (entity/time).
Model
Hits@1
Hits@10
Overall
Entity
Time
Overall
Entity
Time
BERT
0.087
0.097
0.068
0.421
0.351
0.567
CronKGQA
0.288
0.365
0.129
0.736
0.758
0.689
EmbedKGQA
0.260
0.361
0.050
0.618
0.742
0.360
TempoQR
0.438
0.585
0.132
0.853
0.906
0.743
TempoQR-Hard
0.632
0.721
0.448
0.933
0.942
0.914
Table 4: Comparison on the Complex-CronQuestions test set. Metrics are reported for overall performance and answer type (entity/time).
Model
MultiTQ
TimeQuestions
Hits@1
Hits@10
Hits@1
Hits@10
Overall
Entity
Time
Overall
Entity
Time
Overall
Entity
Time
Overall
Entity
Time
BERT
0.103
0.117
0.069
0.516
0.632
0.234
0.450
0.409
0.556
0.569
0.520
0.698
CronKGQA
0.278
0.387
0.011
0.527
0.724
0.046
0.326
0.296
0.405
0.454
0.409
0.569
EmbedKGQA
0.243
0.342
0.002
0.489
0.685
0.012
0.288
0.266
0.344
0.468
0.426
0.577
TempoQR
0.327
0.456
0.014
0.571
0.783
0.055
0.409
0.406
0.416
0.530
0.513
0.574
Table 5: Comparison on the MultiTQ and TimeQuestions test sets.
Figure 2: Behavioral dynamics of the differentiable working memory ( K=4 ) across 30,000 CronQuestions validation instances. The network dynamically routes computation depth, shifting attention mass to H3 for compositional temporal queries.
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 3: TComplEx pipeline used to initialize the temporal KG embeddings. The model learns complex-valued embeddings for entities, relations, and timestamps, and supports both entity ranking and timestamp ranking through the same compositional scoring function.
Figure 4: Question encoding and slot contextualization in SABER-TQA. Question tokens are encoded by a pretrained language model and projected into the temporal KG embedding space. Head, tail, and temporal slot embeddings are retrieved from the shared TKG table and attend to the question representation, followed by gated residual fusion to produce contextualized role-specific vectors.
Figure 5: Iterative hop-wise reasoning in SABET-QA. At each hop, the current latent reasoning state is combined with the global question summary and transformed into a hop-specific relation representation. Dedicated entity-oriented and temporal-oriented projections generate entity and timestamp scores, whose soft distributions are converted into a working-memory representation used to update the latent state for the next reasoning hop.
Dataset
Train
Valid
Test
Total
Split Ratio (Tr/Va/Te)
CronQuestions
350,000
30,000
30,522
410,522
85.3% / 7.3% / 7.4%
Complex-CronQuestions
35,795
5,020
5,528
46,343
77.2% / 10.8% / 11.9%
MultiTQ
386,787
57,979
54,584
499,350
77.5% / 11.6% / 10.9%
TimeQuestions
6,970
3,236
3,237
13,443
51.8% / 24.1% / 24.1%
Appendix
Table 6: Statistics of the temporal question answering datasets used in our experiments.
Dataset
Entities
Relations
Timestamps
Train Facts
Valid Facts
Test Facts
Total Facts
CronQuestions
125,726
406
9621
323,635
5000
5000
333,635
Complex-CronQuestions
125,726
406
9621
323,635
5000
5000
333,635
MultiTQ
10,488
502
4,017
322,958
69,224
69,147
461,329
TimeQuestions
118,010
884
1,636
227,564
4,997
4,998
240,597
Appendix
Table 7: Statistics of the temporal knowledge graphs associated with each benchmark.
Table 8: Answer type distributions across the benchmarks.
Setting
Value
Optimizer
Adam Kingma and Ba (2017)
Initial learning rate
2×10−4 ( 6×10−4 for Timequestions Dataset )
Maximum epochs
20 (50 for Timequestions Dataset)
Training batch size
150
Validation batch size
150
Validation frequency
Every epoch
Appendix
Table 9: Training settings used for all experiments unless otherwise noted.
Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) is challenging because it requires multi-hop reasoning under complex temporal constraints. Recent LLM-based approaches have improved semantic modeling for this task, but many still rely on fixed reasoning workflows or costly post-training, which can limit adaptability and make error recovery difficult. We show that enabling an off-the-shelf Large Language Model (LLM) to determine its next action is already effective in a zero-shot setting. Based on this insight, we propose AT2QA, an Autonomous and Training-free Agent for TKG Question Answering. AT2QA empowers the LLM to iteratively interact with the TKG via a generic search tool, inherently enabling autonomous exploration and dynamic self-correction during reasoning. To further elicit the LLM's potential for complex temporal reasoning, we introduce a training-free experience mining mechanism that distills a compact few-shot demonstration library from successful self-generated trajectories. AT2QA also yields a transparent audit trail for every prediction. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks -- MultiTQ, Timeline-CronQuestion, and Timeline-ICEWS-Actor -- show that AT2QA achieves new state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the strongest baselines by 10.7, 4.9, and 11.2 absolute points, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/AT2QA-Official-Code/AT2QA-Official-Code
Xufei Lv, Jiahui Yang, Haoyuan Sun +5
Tsinghua University · National University of Defense Technology
Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA) has attracted growing interest for handling time-sensitive queries. However, existing methods still struggle with: 1) weak incorporation of temporal constraints in question representation, causing biased reasoning; 2) limited ability to perform explicit multi-hop reasoning; and 3) suboptimal fusion of language and graph representations. We propose a novel framework with temporal-aware question encoding, multi-hop graph reasoning, and multi-view heterogeneous information fusion. Specifically, our approach introduces: 1) a constraint-aware question representation that combines semantic cues from language models with temporal entity dynamics; 2) a temporal-aware graph neural network for explicit multi-hop reasoning via time-aware message passing; and 3) a multi-view attention mechanism for more effective fusion of question context and temporal graph knowledge. Experiments on multiple TKGQA benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over multiple baselines.
Wuzhenghong Wen, Bowen Zhou, Jinwen Huang +5
School of Internet of Things, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Faculty of Medicine & Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia · Beijing Information Science and Technology University +2
Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) requires answer inference from evidence that is both structurally valid and temporally admissible. Existing methods often leave anchor-event binding, temporal admissibility, and ordinal selection implicit in model reasoning, task-specific training, or similarity-driven retrieval, allowing locally relevant but invalid facts to enter the answer context. We formulate complex TKGQA as evidence-space control and propose SCoP (Structured Constraint Parsing), a constraint-centric framework that externalizes temporal decisions before answer inference. Instead of treating retrieved facts as admissible evidence by default, SCoP separates answer-seeking event patterns from temporal anchor events, conservatively grounds them to canonical TKG entities and relations, and translates temporal intent into executable constraints with optional ranking requirements. These constraints operate over normalized point and interval ranges, enabling deterministic filtering of structurally compatible candidates and producing a compact evidence space for generation. Experiments on MultiTQ and TimelineCronQ-R assess SCoP across timestamped point-fact and interval-oriented settings with richer temporal relations and ordering dependencies. Without task-specific parameter updates, SCoP achieves 0.825 Hits@1 on MultiTQ and 0.761 Hits@1 on TimelineCronQ-R, with gains on constraint-intensive question types. These results support explicit evidence-space control over unconstrained retrieval or implicit temporal reasoning.
Xiaokun Guo, Zhen Xu, Dongdong Huo +3
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China