AnchorRM: Parallel Intra-Batch State Reconstruction with Anchor-Based Residual Memory for Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) have shown strong performance on dynamic graph learning tasks by continuously updating node memories from evolving interactions (i.e., events) and leveraging these memories for downstream predictions. As graphs grow rapidly in modern applications, training requires processing an increasing number of events; meanwhile, each event can update node memories used by later events, creating dependencies that constrain parallel execution and limit the benefits of additional computing resources. These costs motivate an upstream question: Are all events, and the dependencies they introduce, necessary for learning? We investigate this question through two roles of temporal events: prediction targets and historical events sampled as inputs. We observe that targets involving stable node memories tend to exhibit lower prediction loss, while filtering historical events associated with stable memories can retain similar training-loss trajectories in several evaluated settings. Together, these observations suggest an opportunity to identify input redundancy through changes in node memories. Building on this opportunity, we propose RAFT, a redundancy-aware input-filtering framework for TGNN training. RAFT tracks memory changes during training and uses them to guide two filters: a root-event filter removes selected prediction targets before training, and a support-event filter excludes selected historical context during sampling. Filtering inputs before their downstream preparation and processing reduces the work they trigger. Across three TGNN models and five datasets, RAFT reduces training inputs by 35.23% on average and up to 97.11%, while reducing recorded training time by up to 52.56% with negligible changes to model precisions.

Temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) achieve superior performance in many dynamic graph learning tasks. These models use node state vectors (i.e., memories) to capture and record graph changes (i.e., events), and then exploit these memories to assist prediction. However, this memory-centric design makes multi-GPU training challenging because predictions for later events often depend on memory updates from earlier events. To maintain model quality, existing multi-GPU TGNN training schemes strictly preserve all event dependencies, which limits parallelism and causes expensive cross-GPU memory synchronization. In this work, we observe that many of these dependencies can be handled more flexibly without harming training quality. Specifically, (a) dependencies in TGNN training have high locality in both time and graph topology, (b) the short-range dependencies missed within a large batch can often be recovered cheaply, and (c) many memory updates are not immediately needed. Based on these observations, we propose DepBloom to accelerate multi-GPU TGNN training with three techniques: (1) temporally bounded spatial partitioning to reduce unnecessary cross-GPU synchronization and improve parallelism; (2) intra-batch memory refinement to recover missing short-range temporal dependencies inside enlarged batches; and (3) critical-path optimization to prioritize urgent memory updates while deferring non-critical work during multi-GPU pipeline execution. Experimental results across representative models and diverse datasets show that DepBloom achieves an average speedup of 2.84$\times$ and up to 5.16$\times$ over state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining comparable or better model accuracy.

Temporal graph networks suffer from irregular supervision in realworld dynamic graphs, as most minibatches contain few labeled events. The lack of labels leads to high-variance gradient updates and, consequently, slow wall-clock convergence. To constructively reduce sparsity, our Moving-Averaged Labels (MAL) assigns soft pseudo-targets based on past supervised signals using a running label distribution while leaving the loss and the model architecture unchanged. Thus, supervision gaps are replaced with informative signals independent of a temporal graph model and the message passing or memory components used. Theoretical analysis supports our insight that aggregating historical supervision into moving average targets reduces stochastic gradient variance, yielding faster convergence under mild assumptions. Experimentally, for TGNv2 and DyRepv2 (our modification of DyRep) models, MAL boosts predictive performance, establishing a new SOTA, and improves time-to-accuracy (on average 6x faster to reach the top score) for a common suite of Temporal Graph Benchmark datasets.