Learning Across Temporal Graph Representation Silos
Authors: Minwoo Yu, Young-guk Ha
Organizations: M. Yu and Y.-g. Ha are with Smart Computing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Konkuk University, Seoul 05029, Republic of Korea.
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.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Relational dynamics across temporal graph representation silos. We ask what can be learned and reused beneath different observation and prediction formats. Representation-specific colors transitioning to a neutral color below illustrate the perspective of relational dynamics as a common object of study. Color boundaries and overlaps are conceptual and assume neither identical dynamics nor a common latent space. The dashed “Others” silo denotes future extensions. The bottom summarizes the existence of reuse, dependence on source organization, reuse across domains and training fractions, and source utility rankings. The right contrasts GPH 2 [ 8 ] , which designs unified multi-view inputs and expert fusion, with our focus on the object of learning itself across representations.
Setting
CTDG
TKG
Dataset
Wikipedia, Reddit, MOOC
ICEWS14, GDELT, ICEWS05-15
Task / metrics
Link prediction; AP, AUC
Head/tail forecasting; filtered MRR, Hits@1/3/10
Checkpoint selection
Full-validation AP
100-negative MRR; full validation (256 queries for the DyGFormer Wiki → ICEWS14 diagnostic)
Test evaluation
1 random destination per positive
Bidirectional queries × all entities; timestamp filtering
TABLE I: Datasets and evaluation settings.
Direction
Metric
Frozen backbone
Seed 7
Seed 17
Seed 37
Mean ± SD
Mean Δ
Wiki → ICEWS14
Test MRR
Random
0.1225
0.1177
0.1092
0.1165±0.0067
—
Wiki → ICEWS14
Test MRR
Source-pretrained
0.2168
0.1894
0.2115
0.2059±0.0145
+0.0894
ICEWS14 → Wiki
Test AP
Random
0.8414
0.8264
0.8713
0.8463±0.0228
—
ICEWS14 → Wiki
Test AP
Source-pretrained
TABLE II: Bidirectional frozen transfer with DyGFormer.
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.
Shuai-Long Lei, Xiaobin Zhu, Jiarui Liang +3
University of Science and Technology Beijing, Haidian, Beijing, China
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 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.