Zero-Shot Link Prediction

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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Period ending 2026-09-07

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40 papers

Latest in Zero-Shot Link Prediction

Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

EdgeReMIND: A Scalable, Top-Ranked Memorization Baseline for Temporal Multi-Relational Link Prediction

Temporal link prediction on the Temporal Graph Benchmark 2.0 (TGB 2.0) faces a scalability ceiling: on the benchmark's three largest datasets, every existing embedding method runs out of memory or exceeds the time budget. These large-scale graphs are the ones nearest real deployment scale, so failing on them is a real production limitation. EdgeReMIND sets the highest reported test mean reciprocal rank (MRR) on six of eight TGB 2.0 datasets and is the only relation-aware method that runs on all of them. This linear memorization model, with learned per-relation weights over data-calibrated features, is therefore not merely a fallback where embeddings fail but a practical state-of-the-art baseline across the benchmark.
Bryant Pollard
Sep 12, 2026cs.LG

Reification as a Transferable Vocabulary: Zero-Shot Link Prediction with Vanilla GNNs

Knowledge graph foundation models such as ULTRA achieve zero-shot link prediction on unseen graphs through dedicated architectures that hard-code a transfer mechanism. In this work we move that mechanism out of the architecture and into the representation, by \emph{reifying} the input graph: every fact becomes a node, connected to its subject, object, and relation type through a fixed vocabulary of six meta-relations, with relation types as anonymous shared nodes rather than model parameters. On this representation, five textbook GNNs (GAT, GINE with sum and with mean+max aggregation, GraphSAGE, R-GCN), each trained on a single knowledge graph of 4,245 triples for 30 minutes on one NVIDIA A100, transfer zero-shot to 40 inductive link-prediction benchmarks. The best of them, an off-the-shelf GAT, matches ULTRA, a dedicated foundation model pretrained on three graphs, across ULTRA's own evaluation suite. The same fixed vocabulary extends to relational databases, a row becoming an entity and a foreign-key column a relation type; a preliminary probe on two unseen databases, with no cell values, schema text or in-context labels, shows a model of this family pretrained on three knowledge graphs ranking foreign-key targets far above random-initialization and degree controls. We release the code, the checkpoints, and the evaluation pipeline for all 40 benchmarks.
Camille Pradel
Sep 10, 2026cs.NI

Improving 5G AI-RAN MCS Selection by Predicting Retransmissions

Link Adaptation (LA) in 5G NR is inherently reactive, relying on channel measurements and HARQ feedback that may become quickly obsolete when the channel changes quickly. This data is also noisy, making it hard to track accurately, and has to be fed to real-time controllers with feedback-loop effects which are hard to troubleshoot. This explains why most practical deployments select simple but robust algorithms, which accept that the lag can leave the scheduler operating at overly aggressive or unnecessarily conservative rates, trading spectrum efficiency for predictable performance. In this paper, we improve on this status-quo with NOSTRAdAMUS, a predictive LA framework which adds foresight to existing algorithms without replacing or redesigning them. NOSTRAdAMUS predicts whether a retransmission will occur in the next radio frame from recent HARQ history, and applies corrections to the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) selected by the underlying policy. We benchmark several ML models and show that Gradient Boosting achieves 82.9% accuracy overall with high-confidence interventions that are correct 94.2% of the time, and an inference latency of 5.5 {\mu}s. We train the model based on data collected Over-the-Air (OTA) on the X5G testbed, using the open-source OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G stack, NVIDIA Aerial, and COTS O-RAN Radio Units and User Equipments. The model is then deployed as a dApp, which we evaluate OTA as well as on various channels with hardware-in-the-loop channel emulators. This includes 3GPP TDL and CDL channels, SISO and MIMO configurations, and pedestrian and vehicular mobility. Our evaluation shows that without retraining, and across this variety of scenarios, the dApp augments two SOTA LA algorithms, and increases goodput by up to 71.5% while reducing retransmissions by up to 71.8%. This demonstrates the robustness and generalization capabilities of our approach.
Tamerlan Aghayev, Maxime Elkael, Michele Polese +5
Sep 3, 2026cs.CL

Pattern Over-Generalization of Knowledge Graph Embedding

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) demonstrates its effectiveness for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs (KGs) by projecting entities and relations into a low-dimensional vector space. It is crucial for KGE models to effectively capture inference patterns (patterns) inherent in KGs, such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion and composition. Although recent KGE models exhibit strong capabilities in modeling such diverse patterns, they suffer from inherent limitations stemming from pattern over-generalization, where embeddings learned from only a single pattern instance inevitably generalize that pattern to all related instances, i.e., generalize the pattern universally. To address this issue, we propose PogRE (Pattern Over-Generalization Robust Embedding), a simple but effective method that utilizes dense linear transformations and compound operations for relation representation. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that a dense linear transformation allows a pattern to become progressively universal as more triples are observed in the pattern. Furthermore, after observing d+1 linearly independent entities (d+1 denotes the dimension of entity), the linear transformation guarantees universal generalization of the pattern across all related instances. Experimental results on three standard benchmark datasets show that PogRE outperforms existing state-of-the-art KGE models in link prediction. Moreover, our empirical results indicate that PogRE effectively addresses the negative impact of over-generalization.
Junsik Kim, Kangil Kim
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

Fairness in Link Prediction Beyond Demographic Parity: A Reproducibility Study

In fair ranked link prediction, demographic parity (ΔDPΔ_\mathrm{DP}) is a common fairness metric. Yet, Mattos et al. (2025) argue that it fails to detect exposure bias because it ignores where links appear in the ranking. In this study, we reproduce this claim by showing that ΔDPΔ_\mathrm{DP} can indicate aggregate parity even when some subgroup-pair links are systematically ranked lower than others. The proposed rank-aware Normalized Discounted KL-divergence (NDKL), however, does detect such disparities. We also reproduce the effectiveness of MORAL, a post-processing method that improves exposure-based fairness while maintaining competitive utility. Beyond reproduction, we assess robustness using synthetic homophily settings, categorical sensitive attributes, and additional fairness and utility metrics, including subgroup-pair-adapted Attention-Weighted Rank Fairness (AWRF). Overall, our results show that exposure-based metrics uncover biases hidden by ΔDPΔ_\mathrm{DP} and that MORAL reduces these biases with minimal utility loss across diverse settings and datasets. We release a corrected, reproducible implementation at https://github.com/Floris93100/reproducing-MORAL.
Valentijn Oldenburg, Floris de Kam, Stef de Wildt +1
Aug 9, 2026cs.LG

Multi-Relational Knowledge Graph Enhanced Embedding for Trajectory-User Linking

Trajectory-User Linking (TUL) aims to identify the owner of an anonymous trajectory from a set of candidate users, providing a basis for user mobility analysis and personalized location-aware services. Existing methods often learn Point of Interest (POI), temporal, and semantic features independently, make limited use of structural knowledge shared across trajectories, and compress structural and sequential information before classification. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Relational Knowledge Graph Enhanced Embedding for Trajectory-User Linking (MakeTUL), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt to introduce knowledge graph representation learning into TUL. MakeTUL organizes visit-time, POI-category, and transfer-speed information as typed relations in a multi-relational mobility knowledge graph, allowing heterogeneous mobility semantics to jointly constrain the learned embeddings. The resulting POI representations are further enriched with high-order co-occurrence patterns extracted from the trajectory collection, providing structural prior knowledge for sparse and overlapping trajectories. By integrating these prior-enhanced representations with temporal, category, and transfer information, the trajectory sequence learning module captures ordered mobility patterns, while a dual-branch classification layer preserves and combines global structural evidence and sequential evidence at the decision level.
Zhifeng Chu, Bin Wang
Aug 9, 2026cs.LG

Neural Message Passing on Structural Interaction Graphs for Fully-Inductive Graph Neural Networks

A central obstacle in building graph foundation models is the input heterogeneity in terms of feature space dimensionality, semantics, and structure. Such heterogeneity limits the capability of graph neural networks to generalize to new graphs with unseen feature spaces. We address the transferability challenge with SIGIL, a framework that maps any attributed graph to a unified representation space of fixed dimension. Given a graph, SIGIL lifts it to a structural interaction graph, where nodes are the input feature dimensions and weighted, typed edges encode feature alignment across multiple orders of the graph's connectivity. A relational message-passing network embeds each feature dimension into a shared space, transforming the original node features, of arbitrary dimensionality, into representations transferable to any downstream graph. By construction, SIGIL is equivariant to permutations of nodes, feature dimensions, and labels. Additionally, when the input features are one-hot indicators of discrete relations, SIGIL recovers and strictly generalizes existing foundation models for knowledge graph reasoning. A single SIGIL model, pretrained on one graph, delivers strong fully-inductive link prediction. Also, SIGIL can be used to implement existing knowledge graph foundation models. As such, SIGIL unifies several existing regimes in graph foundation model design under a single framework
Omer Yom-Tov, Avigdor Gal
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Where Does Neural Advantage Arise in Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph Prediction?

Aggregate performance on continuous-time dynamic graphs (CTDGs) combines, in a single score, the portion attributable to known temporal regularities and the additional predictive power of neural models. This study separates the two at the query level. We construct a mechanism-constrained predictor that uses pair recurrence, recency and history position, renewal patterns, and short sequential transitions while learning the compatibility within each mechanism. Across four CTDG datasets, this predictor recovers a substantial portion of the performance of strong neural baselines, and the recovered performance quickly saturates with a small, dataset-specific set of explicit mechanisms. Neural residuals concentrate on queries for which the positive and negative candidates have similar mechanism-execution profiles. Allowing conditional interactions among mechanisms is more effective than simply reweighting their existing contributions. Conditioning the contribution of one mechanism on the execution state of another recovers 54.9-73.2% of the original neural-only queries and improves overall paired accuracy on all four datasets. Although the magnitude of the effect varies across datasets, these results show that the performance gap of neural CTDG models need not be treated solely as an opaque difference in representational capacity. At least part of the gap is localized to queries with similar candidate execution profiles and can be functionally explained by conditional coordination among known, low-dimensional mechanisms.
Minwoo Yu, Young-guk Ha
Aug 6, 2026cs.LG

Dynamic Graph Prompting via Topology-Routed Mixed-Curvature Experts

Dynamic graph prompting freezes a pre-trained temporal backbone and adapts it to label-scarce downstream tasks using lightweight prompts. However, existing methods operate within a single, fixed embedding space. In this work, we reveal that temporal shifts in local clustering and degree heterogeneity actively reorganize the edge curvature spectrum---indicating that the optimal representation geometry dynamically evolves with local topology over time. We formalize this unaddressed mismatch as geometry under-adaptation. To overcome this limitation, we propose CurvPrompt, a topology-routed geometry prompting framework for dynamic graphs. Instead of relying on a single space, CurvPrompt maintains a bank of curvature-diverse Riemannian experts, each paired with a learnable prompt. A topology-aware gate dynamically routes each node--time instance to a sparse subset of experts, constructing a personalized mixed-curvature representation. To ensure parameter efficiency and training stability under extreme label scarcity, CurvPrompt employs soft routing during pre-training to build a continuous topology--geometry mapping, and transitions to hard Top-K routing with uniform weights during downstream adaptation. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets show that CurvPrompt significantly advances few-shot link prediction while delivering strong, consistent performance on node classification tasks, validating the necessity of geometry-adaptive prompting.
Quanxin Wang, Xuanting Xie, Bingheng Li +4
Aug 5, 2026cs.SI

Link prediction on multi-relational graphs from an influence propagation perspective

Predicting the existence and type of links (edges) between nodes in a multi-relational graph is key for applications from social interaction prediction to knowledge relationship identification. Enhancing local features with relevant global information is crucial for accurate link prediction, yet it remains challenging. We address this by modeling the relationship between node pairs as node influence. That is, whether the node influence can be propagated and what type of influence is propagated indicates where and what type the edge is, which will be the most relevant local and global information to predict the edges. To this end, we extend the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) epidemic model to capture the influence propagation of nodes on a large scale through sub-graph structures. Subsequently, these sub-graphs are compressed using virtual edges, thereby substantially reducing the computation associated with utilizing the global graph structure. Finally, we propose the Influential Graph Neural Predictor, referred to as IGNP, a link prediction framework guided by influence propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, which outperforms strong baselines by a large margin on the widely used and real-world datasets.
Zidu Yin, Yuankai Qi, Dong Gong +3
Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

ProPRL: Property-Aware Prerequisite Relation Learning in Educational Knowledge Graphs

Prerequisite relation learning is central to adaptive instruction, yet existing methods often formulate it as conventional link prediction, limiting their ability to adaptively integrate complementary educational evidence for individual candidate pairs and to discourage contradictory reverse predictions. We propose ProPRL, a Property-aware Prerequisite Relation Learning framework. ProPRL first learns complementary concept representations from a concept-resource hypergraph and a directed learning-behavior graph, where direction-preserving personalized propagation aggregates multi-hop behavioral evidence. It then employs a Pair-conditioned Gate to adaptively weight and fuse the two views for each candidate ordered concept pair. Finally, an \textit{Irreversibility Constraint} introduces an anti-symmetry regularizer that penalizes simultaneously high confidence in both directions of the same concept pair. Experiments on multiple real-world educational datasets show that ProPRL achieves state-of-the-art performance on prerequisite relation learning.
Xinghe Cheng, Jiapu Wang, Chaobo He +2
Jul 31, 2026cs.SI

Multi-Granularity Position Embedding of Graphs via Granular-Ball for Link Prediction

Link prediction aims to identify potential or future connections within a given graph structure. Position information is essential for link prediction, as it distinguishes homogeneous nodes through their relative relationships, facilitating the accurate capture of structural patterns and implicit connections. Previous studies derive node positional information as distances to single-granularity landmarks, defined as the centers of homophilic regions, while neglecting the multi-granularity nature of homophilic structures and their hierarchical interrelations. We propose the Multi-Granularity Position Embedding of Graphs via Granular-Ball for Link Prediction (MGLP) method to obtain multi-granularity position embedding of graphs. Specifically, MGLP introduces an Adaptive Granular-Ball Graph Refinement mechanism to adaptively refine the graph into homophilic subdomains with optimal levels of granularity. The central nodes within subdomains are treated as landmarks, which form a Hierarchical Central Graph. Moreover, a novel Multi-granularity Hierarchical Distance encoding mechanism is proposed to capture both the homophilic structures within a graph and their hierarchical correlations, improving the discriminative power of nodes. Experimental results demonstrate that the multi-granularity position embedding generated by our method exhibits excellent performance and strong competitiveness compared to baseline algorithms for link prediction. Our codes are available in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MGLP-D3C5/.
Sen Zhao, Cheng Liu, Shuyin Xia +4
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Dynamic Spectral Filtering for Temporal Graph Learning: Learning Evolving Propagation Operators

Temporal graph learning is commonly organized around the evolution of node states or the encoding of interaction histories. We study an underexplored, operator-centric question: should the graph propagation mechanism itself evolve over time? We introduce Dynamic Spectral Filtering (DSF), which represents propagation at snapshot t by a Chebyshev polynomial filter with vector-valued, time-dependent coefficients. DSF explicitly treats these compact multi-order coefficients as recurrent temporal states. A recurrent branch proposes updates, while multiplicative global and order-specific gates regulate their magnitude. The temporal state is independent of the number of nodes. On MOOC, Wikipedia, and Reddit temporal link-prediction benchmarks, converged DSF runs attain AP scores of 0.7851, 0.9088, and 0.9860, respectively, with 93K to 133K trainable parameters, 68 to 182 MB peak GPU memory, and 1.6 to 2.1 seconds of training per epoch. Against the closely related DEFT baseline, DSF is better on MOOC, within 0.001 AP on Reddit, and modestly lower on Wikipedia, while using 8.3 to 8.6 times fewer parameters, 25 to 33 times less GPU memory, and 5 to 19 times less time per epoch. Relative to all measured alternatives, it uses 3.3 to 38.6 times less GPU memory. These results support direct spectral-response evolution as a useful temporal inductive bias when computational efficiency is a first-class requirement.
Yan Kong
Jul 7, 2026cs.SI

Signed-Graph Recommendation as Structural Consistency Maximization

While signed social recommendation has shown great potential by modeling both trust and distrust relations, its effectiveness is often hindered by structural noise and data sparsity. In this work, we first identify a fundamental inconsistency across the structural, propagation, and semantic layers of existing models, which leads to biased representations learned from sparse or noisy datasets. Furthermore, we observe that most existing methods treat the observed graph as fixed, failing to bridge the gap between noisy topologies and reliable social semantics. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework named SSC-Loop that treats signed social recommendation as the maximization of structural consistency. SSC-Loop includes three dedicated modules: ESA-DA for structural consistency, a P/N/O propagation mechanism for propagation consistency, and a contrastive learning objective for semantic consistency. Experiments on Epinions demonstrate that SSC-Loop achieves strong performance on explicit signed social rating prediction, while auxiliary results on Slashdot under a derived link-existence setting further suggest its ability to exploit signed social structures. Source code is available at https://github.com/Refrainwww/SSC-Loop.
Zifan Wang, Siyu Chen, Wenzhuo Song
Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Triplet Plausibility: Relation Set Completion in Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) organize real-world knowledge as triplets and underpin many downstream applications. Due to their inherent incompleteness, knowledge graph completion (KGC) is widely studied and is typically formulated as triplet prediction, with link prediction as the dominant paradigm. However, this formulation focuses on the incompleteness of triplet-wise information and overlooks the incompleteness of entity-relation compatibility information. To address this limitation, we introduce a relation set completion task (RSC), which complements the link prediction task and aims to reason about missing relations that are semantically compatible with a given entity. We further propose a Relation Set Embedding model (RelSetE), which models latent patterns among the observed relations of entities to infer missing ones. To evaluate RelSetE, we derive three benchmark datasets from standard KG benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RelSetE effectively captures entity-relation compatibility patterns and performs favorably in inferring missing relations of entities. Code and data are publicly available.
Zihao Zheng, Borui Cai, Yao Zhao +2
Jun 26, 2026cs.AI

RelBall: Relation Ball with Quaternion Rotation for Knowledge Graph Completion

Real-world knowledge graphs are often incomplete, lacking many valid facts. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims to predict missing links using known triples, thereby enhancing graph coverage. A key challenge is modeling diverse relational patterns such as symmetry, antisymmetry, inversion, composition and semantic hierarchy. Existing models such as RotatE can capture symmetric, antisymmetric, inverse, and commutative composition patterns, yet struggle with non-commutative composition. Rotate3D addresses this by introducing non-commutativity via three-dimensional rotations, but still fails to capture the semantic hierarchies prevalent in knowledge graphs. Moreover, both models cannot effectively model one-to-many relations. To overcome these limitations, we propose RelBall, which extends Rotate3D with two innovations. First, our model introduces modulus transformation to model hierarchies, driving abstract concepts toward smaller moduli and concrete instances toward larger ones. Second, it introduces a tail-centric relation ball to model one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relations. RelBall offers the following advantages: (1) coverage of all relational patterns, including the ones mentioned above; (2) an interpretable hierarchical representation where the modulus directly reflect semantic levels; (3) support for one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relations. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate RelBall's competitive link prediction performance against various baselines.
Yike Liu, Peijia Xie, Chao He +1
Jun 20, 2026cs.LG

Early-Exit Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction

Graph Neural Networks are great for link prediction in various network-like structures; however, the question of their speed/quality tradeoff has been barely studied. While in practice the time it takes to do inference matters little for small benchmarks, the latency does limit applicability in large-scale domains. In this work, we explore early-exiting strategies that can be applied to Graph Neural Networks to solve the problem of link-prediction faster. We use no auxiliary losses to enforce early exiting, allowing it to emerge as an implicit property of the architecture. We show that our method enables early exiting in several setups, moving the Pareto frontier on the HeaRT benchmark for GCN and SAS-GNN backbones. Our findings show that inference speed of GNNs on many link-prediction problems can be improved, while losing little, or even winning in terms of prediction quality. The code is available in our repository: https://github.com/knyazer/link_prediction.
Roman Knyazhitskiy, Andrea Giuseppe Di Francesco
Jun 18, 2026cs.SI

Code evolution for link prediction in complex networks

The problem of predicting links in complex networks appears in different disciplines and has led to a variety of ingenious human-designed methods. We use this rich program space to explore the performance and behavior of automated code-evolution systems tasked to obtain machine-designed methods for link prediction. Despite being trained on limited data, algorithms evolved through code evolution outperform human-designed methods (with an average AUC score of 0.915 vs. 0.783, computed over 580 networks) and show improved computational efficiency, allowing them to be applied to networks with millions of links. The discovered methods follow approaches that have been employed in human-designed methods, but contain key innovations in the selection and combination of node- and link-features. This illustrates the role modern large language models and genetic algorithms can play in algorithmic innovation and scientific discovery more generally.
Alexey Vlaskin, Eduardo G. Altmann
Jun 15, 2026cs.SE

Trust-Aware Multi-Agent Traceability: Confidence-Calibrated Knowledge Graphs for Consistent Software Artifact Management

Multi-agent AI systems are increasingly used to automate software engineering tasks including requirements analysis, architecture design, test generation, and traceability linking. When these agents operate as a sequential pipeline over shared software artifacts, errors and low-confidence decisions made by upstream agents propagate to downstream stages, producing orphaned requirements, contradictory links, and compliance gaps that pose significant risks in safety-critical domains. We propose a trust-aware coordination framework where a shared knowledge graph serves as both centralized semantic memory and a coordination surface through which agents assess and build upon each other's contributions using calibrated confidence scores. Our approach introduces a two-stage traceability link prediction pipeline combining embedding-based retrieval with LLM-based multi-criteria analysis, a traceability seeding mechanism that enables comparison between derivation-time and validation-time confidence, and a consistency protocol governing pipeline interactions through confidence threshold gating, confidence divergence detection, and conflict resolution. We evaluate on an automotive software engineering case study measuring link prediction calibration, protocol effectiveness, threshold sensitivity, and the impact of traceability seeding. Ablation studies confirm that confidence calibration is essential for effective pipeline coordination.
Mohamed Essam, Kareem Wael, Azza Hassan +4
Jun 15, 2026cs.AI

Model Graph Inductive Learning for Knowledge Graph Completion

Link prediction in knowledge graphs fundamentally depends on the quality of learned embeddings for entities and relations. However, most existing methods derive these embeddings by aggregating only the local neighborhood of each entity, neglecting the global structure of the knowledge graph. This limited view prevents models from capturing higher-level structural patterns that are essential for accurate and generalizable link prediction. To address these limitations, we introduce Model Graph Inductive Learning (\textbf{MGIL}), a framework that constructs a model graph by clustering entities based on the similarity of their incoming and outgoing relational structures or their entity types. A GNN is then applied to this model graph to produce embeddings that capture the global view of the knowledge graph. These embeddings subsequently serve as high-quality initial features %embeddings for the original knowledge graph, replacing random initialization and leading to more stable and expressive representations. Extensive experiments on standard and recently proposed inductive benchmarks demonstrate that MGIL achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance in inductive link prediction, highlighting its effectiveness across diverse graph settings.
Mohommad Esmaei Khani, Mahdieh Hasheminejad, Ali Taherkhani +1
Jun 2, 2026cs.SI

Explainable Forecasting of Scientific Breakthroughs from Concept Network Dynamics

We introduce an explainable machine-learning approach that forecasts the structural precursors of scientific breakthroughs -- the emergence and intensification of links between research concepts -- by modelling how OpenAlex concept networks evolve over time. Using 59 semantic and topological features, a two-stage LightGBM model jointly predicts the formation and the future weight of concept pairs, adding a regression stage that quantifies expected intensity to prior link-existence forecasts. Relative to the state of the art, the approach improves accuracy and explainability at once: comparative validation across four technology and biomedical domains yields ROC-AUC in [0.954, 0.967] at all horizons without re-tuning, exceeding the roughly 0.90 of prior models, while every forecast rests on structural, auditable features rather than opaque embeddings. Classification performance is high (AUC about 0.95) and regression remains stable (RMSLE 0.45 to 0.6 over one to five years). Feature attribution shows that structural factors -- particularly Adamic-Adar similarity and degree-based Hadamard measures -- consistently drive accuracy, suggesting that breakthrough-relevant recombinations emerge in tightly connected sub-networks. Two expert-anchored cases, quantum annealing and AI-enabled quantum architectures, show the model surfacing technological convergence consistent with expert expectations. We then outline a three-layer decision architecture -- detection, expert translation, institutional integration -- that turns these forecasts into evidence-based research strategy and policy, anchored in open data and explainable features.
Thomas Maillart, Thibaut Chataing, Ntorina Antoni +4
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Link Prediction or Perdition: the Seeds of Instability in Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Embedding models (KGEMs) constitute the main link prediction approach to complete knowledge graphs. Standard evaluation protocols emphasize rank-based metrics such as MRR or Hits@KK, but usually overlook the influence of random seeds on result stability. Moreover, these metrics conceal potential instabilities in individual predictions and in the organization of embedding spaces. In this work, we conduct a systematic stability analysis of multiple KGEMs across several datasets. We find that high-performance models actually produce divergent predictions at the triple level and highly variable embedding spaces. By isolating stochastic factors (i.e., initialization, triple ordering, negative sampling, dropout, hardware), we show that each independently induces instability of comparable magnitude. Furthermore, for a given model, hyperparameter configurations with better MRR are not guaranteed to be more stable. Moreover, voting, albeit a known remediation mechanism, only provides a limited enhancement of stability. These findings highlight critical limitations of current benchmarking protocols, and raise concerns about the reliability of KGEMs for knowledge graph completion.
Guillaume Méroué, Fabien Gandon, Pierre Monnin
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Are Common Substructures Transferable? Riemannian Graph Foundation Model with Neural Vector Bundles

Foundation models have sparked a revolution via a pretraining-adaptation paradigm, with recent efforts extending this success to graphs. Unlike other modalities, graphs contain rich structural patterns, yet their structural transferability remains poorly understood. Prior studies consider common substructures in the discrete realm, and we are motivated by a fundamental question: Are common substructures transferable? The underlying theory is largely underexplored. In this work, we shift toward learning transferable structures through the lens of functional behavior. Theoretically, we connect transferable substructures to intrinsic geometry of the representation space. However, characterizing such intrinsic geometry has rarely been touched. Grounded in Riemannian geometry, we develop a graph intrinsic geometry learning framework called Neural Vector Bundle, which enables parsing intrinsic geometry with local coordinates. Building on this, we design GAUGE, a pretrainable neural architecture that constructs the vector bundle, flattening geometrically compatible local coordinates, and a new Dirichlet loss, which also measures the transfer effort. We empirically validate its superior expressiveness in challenging tasks including zero-shot link prediction and graph isomorphism.
Li Sun, Zhenhao Huang, Yiding Wang +3
May 30, 2026cs.LG

COPF: An Online Framework for Deployment-Stable Counterfactual Fairness in Evolving Graphs

Online link recommendation on evolving graphs is performative: by choosing which candidate links to show users, the system changes which links form and what feedback it later observes. Consequently, fairness estimates from logged outcomes can be misleading and may drift after deployment when the recommendation policy is updated. We introduce COPF (Counterfactual Online Performative Fairness), a decision-layer framework for deployment-stable fairness monitoring and control in online link recommendation. COPF (i) defines group-level opportunity gaps over exposure (shown vs. not shown) counterfactuals, (ii) makes them estimable by explicit exploration and by logging the probability (propensity) that each candidate is shown, and (iii) audits and controls fairness using residual outcome indistinguishability (OI) over a configurable auditor family with graph-aware doubly robust (GA-DR) estimators. We provide a noisy transfer theorem showing that Residual-OI on estimated GA-DR residuals implies bounds on exposure-counterfactual group gaps under temporal mixing and bounded local interference, and we instantiate an online multicalibration auditor together with a primal-dual controller. Experiments on two TGB streams and a controlled synthetic bipartite stream show that COPF reduces worst-case spikes in exposure-counterfactual group disparities with modest impact on ranking utility. Our code is available at https://github.com/lsnnnnnnnn/COPF.
Sheng'en Li, Dongmian Zou
May 27, 2026cs.LG

Temporal Hyperbolic Graph Representation Learning for Scale-Free Internet Routing and Delay Prediction

Predicting Internet round-trip time (RTT) is critical for routing optimization, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning, and traffic engineering, yet remains challenging due to long-term temporal dependencies, evolving routing dynamics, and heavy-tailed latency distributions. While Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) can model evolving network topologies, most existing approaches operate in Euclidean space, which poorly captures the hierarchical and scale-free structure of Internet routing graphs. Hyperbolic geometry provides a more suitable representation space. We propose HERMIT (Hyperbolic Edge-aware RTT Modeling via Integrated Topology), a hybrid framework combining a hyperbolic manifold-preserving temporal GNN with a Random Forest regressor for joint link prediction and RTT prediction. Built on HMPTGN, HERMIT introduces RTT-aware edge features and a learnable edge encoder to improve modeling of evolving link states and routing behavior. The resulting hyperbolic node representations are combined with historical RTT statistics for robust latency prediction. We evaluate HERMIT on a large-scale real Internet dataset spanning 2015-2024. HERMIT consistently outperforms a strong Random Forest baseline using only historical RTT statistics, achieving a 6% RMSE improvement while reducing large errors on heavy-tailed samples. It also surpasses prior hyperbolic TGNN models, including HMPTGN and HTGN, in link prediction performance. These results demonstrate that combining hyperbolic temporal graph learning with tree-based regression provides a scalable solution for RTT prediction in real-world Internet topologies.
Yi-Ling Kuo, Hao-Yu Tien, Shih-Yu Tsai
May 25, 2026cs.LG

Dynamic Link Prediction with Temporally Enhanced Signed Graph Neural Networks

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.
Derek Regier, Andrew Polyak, Aresh Dadlani +1
May 18, 2026cs.LG

Instance Discrimination for Link Prediction

Recently, instance discrimination models have emerged as a major solution for self-supervised learning. Having already demonstrated its effectiveness in the image domain, instance discrimination learning is now proving equally convincing in the graph domain, in particular for node classification. However, fewer contributions have tackled the link prediction task. In this contribution, we propose to adapt existing methods to this context. We first provide a rigorous evaluation of existing self-supervised models in the field of link prediction, showing that the main performance depends on the augmentation process (like in computer vision). We then propose a new structural augmentation based on the community structure that is relevant for link prediction. Our main contribution introduces two new models, L-GRACE and L-BGRL, based on link representations instead of node representations, which improve the performance of the existing methods, especially on unattributed graphs, and we show that they perform on par with the state of the art, both in supervised and self-supervised contexts.
Valentin Cuzin-Rambaud, Mathieu Lefort, Rémy Cazabet
May 18, 2026cs.CL

Leveraging Graph Structure in Seq2Seq Models for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction

We introduce Graph-Augmented Sequence-to-Sequence (GA-S2S), a novel framework that integrates a T5-small encoder-decoder with a Relational Graph Attention Network (RGAT) to improve link prediction in knowledge graphs. While existing Seq2Seq models rely solely on surface-level textual descriptions of entities and relations and at best, flatten the neighborhoods of a query entity into a single linear sequence, thereby discarding the inherent graph structure, GA-S2S jointly encodes both textual features and the full kk-hop subgraph topology surrounding the query entity. By integrating raw encoder outputs with RGAT's relation-aware embeddings, our model captures and leverages richer multi-hop relational patterns and textual information. Our preliminary experiments on the CoDEx dataset demonstrate that GA-S2S outperforms competitive Seq2Seq-based baseline models, achieving up to a 19% relative gain in link prediction accuracy.
Luu Huu Phuc, Ratan Bahadur Thapa, Mojtaba Nayyeri +3
May 17, 2026cs.LG

UNR-Explainer: Counterfactual Explanations for Unsupervised Node Representation Learning Models

Node representation learning, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), has emerged as a pivotal method in machine learning. The demand for reliable explanation generation surges, yet unsupervised models remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a method for generating counterfactual (CF) explanations in unsupervised node representation learning. We identify the most important subgraphs that cause a significant change in the k-nearest neighbors of a node of interest in the learned embedding space upon perturbation. The k-nearest neighbor-based CF explanation method provides simple, yet pivotal, information for understanding unsupervised downstream tasks, such as top-k link prediction and clustering. Consequently, we introduce UNR-Explainer for generating expressive CF explanations for Unsupervised Node Representation learning methods based on a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). The proposed method demonstrates superior performance on diverse datasets for unsupervised GraphSAGE and DGI.
Hyunju Kang, Geonhee Han, Hogun Park
May 16, 2026cs.GR

QuadLink: Autoregressive Quad-Dominant Mesh Generation via Point-Relation Learning

The generation of production-ready quad-dominant meshes is a cornerstone of modern 3D content creation. Generating anisotropic quad-dominant meshes from point clouds is challenging, as existing methods are typically limited to producing either pure triangular meshes or pure quadrilateral meshes with isotropic densities. In this paper, we present QuadLink, a unified framework consisting of three stages for quad-dominant mesh generation by linking points into structured faces. QuadLink formulates polygonal mesh generation as a hybrid centroid-conditioned vertex linking model: it first predicts a unified set of anchors (vertices and face centroids), then learns centroid-conditioned links that associate vertices with face centroids, and finally assembles polygonal faces with a quad-first strategy guided by robust geometric verification strategies. This link-based formulation enables efficient generation of sparse and anisotropic quad-dominant meshes with coherent edge flow and meanwhile supporting hybrid polygonal topology. To construct training data for this model, we further introduce a Tri-to-Quad Operator that converts artistic triangle meshes into quad-dominant training data via global merge selection. Extensive experiments show that QuadLink produces production-ready quad-dominant meshes from point clouds and achieves improved geometric fidelity and topological quality compared to prior baselines. Our method natively supports hybrid polygonal topology, generalizing to arbitrary n-gon meshes without architectural changes.
Yiheng Zhang, Zhe Zhu, Tingrui Shen +11
May 11, 2026cs.LG

CORE: Cyclic Orthotope Relation Embedding for Knowledge Graph Completion

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to automatically infer missing facts in multi-relational data by mapping entities and relations into continuous representation spaces. Recent region-based embedding models have shown great promise in capturing complex logical patterns by representing relations as geometric regions. However, these models inevitably suffer from absolute boundary constraints during optimization. Conversely, without such constraints, relation regions expand indefinitely. To address the limitation, we propose \textbf{CORE} (Cyclic Orthotope Relation Embedding), a novel KGC model that embeds entities and relations onto a boundary-less torus manifold.CORE represents relations as cyclic orthotopes on the torus manifold, allowing regions to seamlessly wrap around spatial boundaries to ensure smooth gradient conduction. Furthermore, an adaptive width regularization is introduced to prevent unconditional region expansion. Theoretical analysis proves that CORE can capture various complex relation patterns such as subsumption and intersection. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that CORE achieves highly competitive performance, significantly improving link prediction accuracy in dense semantic environments.
Yingqi Zeng, Luying Wang, Huiling Zhu
May 10, 2026cs.LG

GravityGraphSAGE: Link Prediction in Directed Attributed Graphs

Link prediction (inferring missing or future connections between nodes in a graph) is a fundamental problem in network science with widespread applications in, e.g., biological systems, recommender systems, finance and cybersecurity. The ability to accurately predict links has significant real-world applications, such as detecting fraudulent financial transactions or identifying drug-target interactions in biomedicine. Despite a rich literature, link prediction is still challenging, especially for graphs enriched with information on edges (direction) and nodes (attributes). In fact, research on link prediction, especially the one based on Graph Deep Learning (GDL), has mostly focused on undirected graphs, without fully leveraging node attributes. Here, we fill this gap by proposing Gravity-GraphSAGE (GG-SAGE), a modified version of GraphSAGE, a GDL model for node embeddings, composed of a gravity-inspired decoder. This implementation is the first example in the literature of a GraphSAGE backbone adopted for directed link prediction. Using the benchmark datasets Cora, Citeseer, PubMed and 16 real-world graphs from the online Netzschleuder repository, we show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art GDL link prediction techniques. Using further experimental evidence, we relate the quality of the output of our model with various characteristics of the graph, suggesting that our framework scales well when applied to data of increasing complexity.
Riccardo Porcedda, Francesca Chiaromonte, Fabrizio Lillo +1
May 8, 2026cs.LG

RelAgent: LLM Agents as Data Scientists for Relational Learning

Relational learning is a challenging problem that has motivated a wide range of approaches, including graph-based models (e.g., graph neural networks, graph transformers), tabular methods (e.g., tabular foundation models), and sequence-based approaches (e.g., large language models), each with its own advantages and limitations. We propose RelAgent, an LLM-based autonomous data scientist for relational learning, which operates in two phases. In the search phase, an LLM agent uses database, validation, and evaluation workspace tools to construct SQL feature programs and select a predictive model. In the inference phase, the resulting program is executed without further LLM calls. The final predictor consists of SQL queries and a classical model, enabling fast, deterministic, and intrinsically interpretable predictions: features are human-readable queries, and predictions depend only on the resulting query-defined feature map, enabling scalable deployment using standard database systems.
Xingyue Huang, Louis Tichelman, Jinwoo Kim +2
May 7, 2026cs.AI

Graphlets as Building Blocks for Structural Vocabulary in Knowledge Graph Foundation Models

Foundation models excel at language, where sentences become tokens, and vision, where images become pixels, because both reduce to discrete symbols on a shared, fixed grid. Knowledge Graphs share the discreteness, but not the geometry. Their entities and relations are discrete symbols, yet their arrangement is relational and lacks a common, fixed grid. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) share the discreteness, but not the geometry. They form irregular, non-Euclidean topologies whose local neighborhoods differ from graph to graph. Therefore, Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) rely on identifying structural invariances to produce transferable representations. Without a universal token set, KGFMs are limited in their ability to transfer representations across unseen KGs. We close this gap by treating graphlets, small connected graphs, as structural tokens that recur in heterogeneous KGs. In this paper, We introduce a model-agnostic framework based on a vocabulary of graphlets that mines a KG between relations via pattern matching. In particular, we considered closed and open 2- and 3-path, and star graphlets, to obtain robust invariances. The framework is evaluated on 51 KGs from a wide range of domains, for zero-shot inductive and transductive link prediction. Experiments show that adding simple graphlets to the vocabulary yields models that outperform prior KGFMs.
Kossi Amouzouvi, Robert Wardenga, Jens Lehmann +1
May 4, 2026cs.SI

H3: A Healthcare Three-Hop Index for Physician Referral Network Prediction

Accurate prediction of physician referral links is essential for optimizing care coordination and reducing fragmentation in healthcare delivery. However, existing computational methods, ranging from triadic closure heuristics to graph neural networks, fail to capture the intrinsic properties of physician referral networks, including sparsity, disassortative degree mixing, and hub-dominated topology. Here, we propose H3, a healthcare three-hop index that addresses these limitations by modeling indirect referral pathways through intermediate physicians, with degree-based normalization and a redundancy penalty to mitigate hub-mediated noise. Using Medicare Physician Shared Patient Patterns data, we evaluate H3 under two complementary prediction regimes: within-period prediction, which assesses recovery of contemporaneous referral links under sparse conditions, and cross-period prediction, which tests robustness to temporal shift as referral windows expand. Across both regimes, H3 consistently outperforms classical heuristics and deep learning-based baselines. Unlike black-box neural network approaches, H3 produces fully decomposable predictions traceable to specific intermediary physicians, offering a transparent and deployable solution for referral network completion.
Zhexi Gu, Jiaxin Ying, Xu-Wen Wang +1
May 1, 2026cs.LG

Topological Neural Tangent Kernel

Graph neural tangent kernels give a principled infinite-width theory for graph neural networks, but inherit a basic limitation of graph models: they see only pairwise structure. Many relational systems contain higher-order interactions that are more naturally represented by simplicial complexes. We introduce the Topological Neural Tangent Kernel (TopoNTK), an infinite-width kernel for simplicial message passing on edge features. TopoNTK combines lower Hodge interactions, capturing graph-like coupling through shared vertices, with upper Hodge interactions, capturing coupling through filled simplices. This makes the kernel sensitive to topology invisible to graph kernels, allowing complexes with the same graph but different filled simplices to induce different kernels. Beyond expressivity, the Hodge structure gives the kernel an interpretable learning geometry. Edge signals decompose into gradient-like, harmonic, and local circulation components, and the spectrum of the TopoNTK determines how quickly each component is learned. This yields a topological form of spectral bias: components aligned with large-eigenvalue modes are learned quickly, while global harmonic modes, retained through the residual channel, often lie at smaller eigenvalues and are learned more slowly. We prove expressivity, Hodge-alignment, spectral learning, and stability properties, and validate them on synthetic simplicial tasks and DBLP higher-order link prediction. The results show that topology is not merely extra structure; it can provide coordinates that make relational learning more faithful, interpretable, and effective.
Sanjukta Krishnagopal
Apr 28, 2026cs.DS

Incremental Strongly Connected Components with Predictions

Algorithms with predictions is a growing area that aims to leverage machine-learned predictions to design faster beyond-worst-case algorithms. In this paper, we use this framework to design a learned data structure for the incremental strongly connected components (SCC) problem. In this problem, the nn vertices of a graph are known a priori and the mm directed edges arrive over time. The goal is to efficiently maintain the strongly connected components of the graph after each insert. Our algorithm receives a possibly erroneous prediction of the edge sequence and uses it to precompute partial solutions to support fast inserts. We show that our algorithm achieves nearly optimal bounds with good predictions and its performance smoothly degrades with the prediction error. We also implement our data structure and perform experiments on real datasets. Our empirical results show that the theory is predictive of practical runtime improvements.
Ronald Deng, Samuel McCauley, Aidin Niaparast +5
Feb 15, 2026cs.SI

A Hybrid TGN-SEAL Model for Dynamic Graph Link Prediction

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.
Nafiseh Sadat Sajadi, Behnam Bahrak, Mahdi Jafari Siavoshani
Apr 9, 2025cs.LG

FLASH: Flexible Learning of Adaptive Sampling from History in Temporal Graph Neural Networks

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
Jun 7, 2024cs.CR

GENIE: Watermarking Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction

The rapid adoption, usefulness, and resource-intensive training of Graph Neural Network (GNN) models have made them an invaluable intellectual property in graph-based machine learning. However, their wide-spread adoption also makes them susceptible to stealing, necessitating robust Ownership Demonstration (OD) techniques. Watermarking is a promising OD framework for deep neural networks, but existing methods fail to generalize to GNNs due to the non-Euclidean nature of graph data. Existing works on GNN watermarking primarily focus on node and graph classification, overlooking Link Prediction (LP). In this paper, we propose GENIE (watermarking Graph nEural Networks for lInk prEdiction), the first scheme to watermark GNNs for LP. GENIE creates a novel backdoor for both node-representation and subgraph-based LP methods, utilizing a unique trigger set and a secret watermark vector. Our OD scheme is equipped with Dynamic Watermark Thresholding (DWT), ensuring high verification probability while addressing practical issues in existing OD schemes. We extensively evaluate GENIE across 4 diverse model architectures (i.e., SEAL, GCN, GraphSAGE and NeoGNN), 7 real-world datasets and 21 watermark removal techniques and demonstrate its robustness to watermark removal and ownership piracy attacks. Finally, we discuss adaptive attacks against GENIE and a defense strategy to counter it. The codebase and related artifacts are publicly available at our Project Page.
Venkata Sai Pranav Bachina, Aaryan Ajay Sharma, Ankit Gangwal +1