Weak signals are early, low-visibility indicators that precede significant changes before those changes become established. Existing detection methods, based on keyword frequency, topic modeling, or untyped graph topology, fail to capture the semantic and relational structure through which such signals manifest. In this paper, we propose C-Unseen, a self-interpretable framework for weak signal detection in Dynamic Temporal Knowledge Graphs (DTKGs). We define a weak signal as a rare, semantically coherent subgraph that proliferates across consecutive TKG snapshots. The framework operates through two modules: a Rare Subgraphs Extractor, in which an LLM identifies subgraphs whose content is in tension with the dominant snapshot narrative via chain-of-thought reasoning, and a Weak Signal Alerter, in which the persistence of these rare subgraphs is tracked across time steps to isolate true weak signals. Experimental results demonstrate that C-Unseen outperforms keyword-, topic-, and graph-based baselines.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Weak signals precede a strong signal as fragmentary, low-visibility traces whose significance emerges only from their corroboration.
Figure 2: The architecture of our framework
ID
Description
tsweak
tsstrong
SS_FORPROFIT_2019
Conversion to capped-profit (OpenAI LP)
Dec 2015
Mar 2019
SS_BOARD_COUP_2023
Altman removal and reinstatement
Mar 2019
Nov 2023
SS_NYT_LAWSUIT_2023
NYT v. OpenAI copyright suit
Jun 2021
Dec 2023
SS_DEFENCE_TURN_2025
Pivot to defence and national security
Jul 2019
Jun 2025
SS_FORPROFIT_PBC_2025
Conversion to for-profit PBC
Dec 2017
Oct 2025
Table 1: Strong signals annotated in Wiki-OpenAI. The SS date corresponds to test , the date on which the event was publicly confirmed.
Property
Value
Corpus
Source
Wikipedia (OpenAI page)
Period
Jan 2015 – Dec 2025
Number of yearly snapshots
11
Atomic facts
Total
773
Table 2: Summary statistics of the Wiki-OpenAI benchmark dataset.
k
Method
∣DM∣
∣SM+(k)∣
PM(k)
RM(k)
F1,M(k)
1
BEAM
19
3
0.789
0.600
0.682
BERTrend
44.8 ± 5.2
4.20 ± 0.45
0.161 ± 0.021
0.840 ± 0.089
0.270 ± 0.034
Yoon
311
3
0.032
0.600
0.061
C-Unseen
50.2 ± 10.1
5.00
0.444 ± 0.066
1.000
0.613 ± 0.061
2
BEAM
19
1
0.053
0.200
0.083
BERTrend
44.8 ± 5.2
2.80 ± 1.30
0.081 ± 0.026
0.560 ± 0.261
0.141 ± 0.047
Table 3: Detection accuracy on Wiki-OpenAI at shared-anchor-word match thresholds k∈{1,2,3} . C-Unseen and BERTrend are reported as mean ± sample std over n=5 runs; Yoon and BEAM are deterministic and reported from a single run. “–” denotes an undefined value.
k
Method
∣DM∣
∣SM+(k)∣
PM(k)
RM(k)
F1,M(k)
1
BEAM
20
3
0.750
0.600
0.667
BERTrend
49.8 ± 2.0
4.00
0.120 ± 0.035
0.800
0.207 ± 0.053
Yoon
273
3
0.022
0.600
0.042
C-Unseen
58.4 ± 19.9
5.00
0.434 ± 0.076
1.000
0.603 ± 0.073
2
BEAM
20
1
0.050
0.200
0.080
BERTrend
49.8 ± 2.0
3.20 ± 0.45
0.092 ± 0.028
0.640 ± 0.089
0.159 ± 0.044
Table 4: Detection accuracy on Wiki-OpenAI-Anon . Conventions as in Table 3 .
Method
Wiki-OpenAI
Wiki-OpenAI-Anon
BEAM
–
–
BERTrend
1.70 ± 0.45
2.00
Yoon
–
–
C-Unseen
1.00
1.13 ± 0.30
Table 5: Mean lead time LˉMyears(k=3) over covered signals. “–” denotes no covered signal (mean undefined).
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison of the baseline methods’ output over the detected SS_DEFENCE_TURN_2025 by Yoon, BERTrend, and C-Unseen . It was not detected by BEAM.
Arm
∣DM∣
∣SM+∣
PM
F1,M
ΔF1
local+flat
144.8 ± 18.5
5.00
0.059 ± 0.013
0.112 ± 0.023
− 0.159
local+CoT
135.2 ± 19.9
4.80 ± 0.45
0.072 ± 0.010
0.134 ± 0.018
− 0.137 ± 0.089
full DTKG+flat
195.0 ± 14.1
5.00
0.061 ± 0.009
0.115 ± 0.016
− 0.156
full DTKG+CoT
189.6 ± 10.5
5.00
0.069 ± 0.013
0.130 ± 0.023
− 0.141 ± 0.093
C-Unseen
50.2 ± 10.1
4.20 ± 1.10
0.162 ± 0.053
0.271 ± 0.084
—
Table 6: Ablation on Wiki-OpenAI at k=3 , mean ± sample std over n=5 runs.
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
Temporal graph data are recorded in different representations, but whether these differences also determine the scope of learned knowledge reuse remains unclear. This study investigates whether predictive structure learned from relational histories can be reused between continuous-time dynamic graphs (CTDGs) and temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs). Bidirectional reuse emerges while retaining distinct input and prediction interfaces and independent vocabularies, and sources with the same representation are not always more useful. Controlled reorganizations of source histories show that the organization contributing to reuse varies across source-target conditions. We show that learned aspects of Relational Dynamics, the predictive structure present in relational histories, can be reused across conventional representation boundaries. Independently pretrained TKG and CTDG learners can also be fused at the score level to improve prediction on a third dataset without entity or relation-semantic alignment. Two proofs of concept in recommendation and security detection illustrate that external temporal sources without direct alignment can also become useful pretraining resources.
Minwoo Yu, Young-guk Ha
M. Yu and Y.-g. Ha are with Smart Computing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Konkuk University, Seoul 05029, Republic of Korea.
Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) support reasoning over time-evolving facts, yet state-of-the-art models are often computationally heavy and costly to deploy. Existing compression and distillation techniques are largely designed for static graphs; directly applying them to temporal settings may overlook time-dependent interactions and lead to performance degradation. We propose an LLM-assisted distillation framework specifically designed for temporal knowledge graph reasoning. Beyond a conventional high-capacity temporal teacher, we incorporate a large language model as an auxiliary instructor to provide enriched supervision. The LLM supplies broad background knowledge and temporally informed signals, enabling a lightweight student to better model event dynamics without increasing inference-time complexity. Training is conducted by jointly optimizing supervised and distillation objectives, using a staged alignment strategy to progressively integrate guidance from both teachers. Extensive experiments on multiple public TKG benchmarks with diverse backbone architectures demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently improves link prediction performance over strong distillation baselines, while maintaining a compact and efficient student model. The results highlight the potential of large language models as effective teachers for transferring temporal reasoning capability to resource-efficient TKG systems.
Wang Xing, Wei Song, Siyu Lin +2
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University · School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University · School of Information Science and Engineering, Chongqing Jiaotong University