Temporal Graphs

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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A weekly snapshot of new work published in Temporal Graphs.

33 papers

Latest in Temporal Graphs

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 10, 2026cs.AI

From Explanations to Interventions: Execution-Guided Counterfactual Synthesis in Temporal Graphs

Can a trace explaining model execution also compute the changes needed for a specified alternative prediction? We propose trace-guided intervention search, which uses executable reasoning traces as an intermediate representation for intervention synthesis. A Specified-Foil Counterfactual edits past events so that a frozen temporal predictor selects a designated foil. Our method constructs facts and replacement values from completed original and foil executions and recovered unmet conditions. Proposal generation constructs edits and selects candidates within a fixed cap; exact replay verifies foil top-1 outcomes among retained edits and compositions. Implemented in LiFTER for continuous-time dynamic graphs (CTDGs) and TLogic for temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs), the method improves success over coordinate-based proposal generation by 13.7-34.7 percentage points on four CTDG datasets and 60.0-83.3 points on two TKG datasets under matched downstream search and a proposal cap of 32. Separate shared-candidate comparisons retain 85.7-93.6% of black-box greedy's CTDG success rate with 75.0-80.0% fewer predictor evaluations. A Pulse case study confirms simulator-level survival for five of six interventions. Executable traces thus provide both explanatory evidence and a reusable computational representation for constructing and testing specified alternatives.
Minwoo Yu, Young-guk Ha
Sep 8, 2026cs.AI

TTGBench: Benchmarking Topological Evolution and Semantic Drift in Text-attributed Temporal Graphs

Temporal graph learning models the evolution of dynamic systems, where both structural interactions and semantic states change over time. However, existing benchmarks primarily emphasize structural evolution via temporal link prediction (TLP), while support for semantic evolution remains limited. Although temporal node classification (TNC) is sometimes included, it is typically restricted to simplistic binary settings that fail to capture realistic semantic drift. Moreover, commonly used datasets exhibit high link repetition, leading to inflated performance estimates and obscuring true model capability. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{TTGBench}, a new benchmark that jointly evaluates structural and semantic evolution. TTGBench comprises six real-world, text-rich datasets characterized by \emph{Dual Volatility}, enabling rigorous and fair evaluation of existing models. Notably, it is the first benchmark to support both multi-class and multi-label TNC, filling a critical gap in evaluating temporal semantic drift. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art methods across Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) and Large Language Model (LLM)-based paradigms. The results reveal a clear \emph{capability divide} between the two paradigms: TGNN-based methods excel at structural prediction but fail at semantic tracking, whereas LLM-based predictors show the opposite trend. Through in-depth analysis, we uncover their fundamental limitations and provide insights for developing more comprehensive temporal graph models.
Longfei Ma, Zemin Liu, Fei Wu
Aug 14, 2026cs.AI

post-graph-rag: A PostgreSQL-Native Bi-Temporal Graph RAG Engine with Temporal Grounding at Synthesis

Graph RAG connects facts no single passage states, but implementations pay three times: in infrastructure, keeping vector store, graph database and document store in sync; in quality, because a pipeline that never refuses extractor output stores edges that assert nothing; and over time, because a graph that only accumulates treats superseded and current facts alike. post-graph-rag is an open-source engine addressing all three. Chunks with embeddings, a canonical entity graph and community summaries live in one PostgreSQL database, with pgvector for search and edge tables for traversal. Extraction output is validated before writing: vague predicates, pronominal names and bare quantities are rejected, predicates normalise onto an optional vocabulary, entities resolve to one vertex per canonical name, and denials keep the positive predicate under a negation flag. A bi-temporal layer records when a relation held and when the system believed it, superseding incompatible earlier assertions from document order. Against LightRAG on three corpora with extraction and embedding models fixed, it builds a denser graph everywhere, up to 2.4×2.4\times the relations per entity, and a more queryable one: 0.46-0.58 distinct edge labels per relation against 0.77-1.33. It supersedes 13 and 8 relationships where the baseline, having no temporal model, supersedes none. On LongMemEval, 500 questions of long-horizon chat memory, it scores 85.8 percent with gemini-3.6-flash against 71.2 for Zep's gpt-4o and 60.2 for a full-context baseline, leading on all six question types. The largest single contribution is temporal grounding in the prompt: carrying each relation's validity period through to synthesis moves temporal reasoning from 0.496 to 0.881, ablated paired on one graph per instance. Code: post-graph-rag https://github.com/crajah/post-graph-rag; post-graph https://github.com/crajah/post-graph
Chandan Rajah
Aug 7, 2026cs.LG

Edge Sparsification via Temporal Forman-Ricci Curvature for Dynamic Graph Learning

Temporal graph learning has become essential for analyzing real-world systems whose interactions continuously evolve over time, including financial transaction networks, communication systems, and online social platforms. However, learning from large-scale temporal graphs remains computationally challenging when networks are dense and rapidly changing. To address this limitation, we propose a network-curvature-inspired edge sparsification framework for dynamic graph learning. Our proposed method, TRicci, extends classical Forman-Ricci curvature to directed weighted temporal graphs by capturing structural support, temporal recency, and local interaction competition. Experiments on 9 transaction networks and 3 temporal graph benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework preserves predictive performance across multiple graph-level prediction tasks. The results show that TRicci sparsifies temporal graphs by approximately 80% while reducing end-to-end downstream training and inference time by an average of 55.94%, without substantial degradation in predictive performance. Our findings suggest that temporal curvature can serve as a principled basis for scalable temporal graph learning by preserving predictive temporal-structural information under substantial sparsification.
Poupak Azad, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Kiarash Shamsi
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

Learning and Clustering on Temporal Graphs: Principles, Primitives, and Pooling

This work focuses on the problem of learning on temporal graphs, with particular emphasis on the task of clustering: obtaining coarse-grained representations by aggregating information from nodes, edges, and temporal dynamics - a task related to pooling in machine learning on graphs, or community detection in network science. Although graph neural networks reach state-of-the-art performance across many downstream graph tasks, their advantage over established descriptive and inferential clustering algorithms is far less settled, especially under demands of efficiency and recovery accuracy. We frame this tension through three linked perspectives: principles, connecting graph learning and community detection through shared spectral foundations and detectability thresholds in stochastic block model regimes; primitives, making spectral clustering and multislice modularity optimization tractable through GPU-accelerated temporal backends; and pooling, viewing principled community detection as a theory-grounded coarse-graining operator for temporal graphs. Our results indicate that algorithmic methods remain the appropriate tool where attributes are absent or weak - scalability rather than accuracy being the binding obstacle - while neural models are most compelling when structural, temporal, and attribute signals align. By making temporal clustering scalable, GPU-accelerated primitives suggest a route toward theory-grounded pooling, while raising a central question: when does community-based coarse-graining preserve the dynamics needed for downstream learning tasks?
Nelson Aloysio Reis de Almeida Passos, Emanuele Carlini, Salvatore Trani
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 28, 2026cs.LG

Contrastive Representation Learning of Longitudinal Disease Trajectories on Temporal Graphs

Understanding disease trajectories from longitudinal clinical data remains challenging due to complex temporal dynamics and heterogeneous patient cohorts. Here, we present a contrastive representation learning framework that models multivariate disease trajectories as temporal graphs and learns representations using contrastive graph neural networks. Nodes represent patient observations over time, while edges capture temporal continuity and structural similarity between trajectories. Structure-aware random walks guide contrastive learning to generate embeddings that preserve temporal context and trajectory topology. The resulting representations enable robust clustering of patients with similar disease progression patterns and reveal latent structure in longitudinal data.
Bastian Pfeifer
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

When Can You Correct Distribution Drift in Temporal Graph Generation? A Sharpening--Drift Tension and an Impossibility for Observation-Based Correction

Generative models of temporal graphs are trained on one stretch of an evolving network and deployed on the next, and they degrade badly in the gap. We show this degradation is derivable, general, and not fixable from observations. The masked flow-matching loss decomposes exactly, with no independence assumption, into an irreducible entropy plus a divergence whose derivative along the training path is positive precisely for structures rare during training and common at deployment, diverging as their training probability goes to zero. Empirically the trade-off is a power law with exponent 0.605-0.605 (R2=0.9977R^2=0.9977), and drift raises the sampler's error floor without changing how many steps reach it: across seven well-powered conditions the drift-period marginal error varies by at most 6%6\% over a 50×50\times range of sampling budgets, while the floor sits 2.2×2.2\times to 34.3×34.3\times above the in-period floor. Because the deployment period is observed, correction looks like a matter of measurement. It is not. We prove that any corrector measurable with respect to past observations leaves at least the conditional variance of the statistic it tracks, and that trend extrapolation beats trusting the last observation only when μ2>v(12ρ)μ^2>v(1-2ρ). Both premises are measurable and both go the wrong way: the drift is trendless and mean-reverting, with a one-step innovation as large as the drift itself. An oracle removes 60%60\% of the error, the best observation-based corrector recovers 5.7%5.7\% of that, and extrapolation is strictly worse than doing nothing clever.
Tianpeng Li, Xuan Guo, Wenjun Wang +2
Jul 26, 2026cs.SI

GTIN: A Unified Framework for Joint Event and Time Prediction in Temporal Graphs

Temporal graphs are increasingly used to model dynamic systems in diverse domains such as social networks, financial networks, and traffic networks. Predicting both what the next event will be and when it will occur in these systems is crucial for understanding and anticipating complex behaviors, but has not been studied much. To address this gap, we propose a unified mathematical framework capable of capturing varying degrees of complexity across temporal graphs. Our framework is flexible and expressive enough to accommodate a wide range of network structures and temporal dynamics. Building upon this analysis, we introduce our novel approach for jointly predicting the next event and its occurrence time. Empirical evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing techniques, particularly in scenarios involving irregular event patterns and complex temporal dependencies. These findings highlight the potential of our framework as a robust foundation for future research in temporal event prediction.
Mohammad Ostadmohammadi, Sepehr Kazemi, Hamid R. Rabiee
Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

What Softmax Throws Away: Mass-Aware Attention for Evidence Accumulation

High task performance does not show whether a model retains prediction-relevant structural information in its internal representation. Temporal graph models, for example, can achieve high future-link AUC while basic graph statistics remain difficult to recover from the same representation. We identify one source of this gap in the weighted averaging used by standard attention: when an evidence pattern is repeated, the numerator and denominator grow at the same rate, so inputs with different amounts of accumulated evidence can produce the same aggregate. We propose Mass-Aware Attention (MAA), which generalizes standard L1 normalization to an Lp family. Under repetition, MAA makes the numerator and denominator scale at different rates, retaining the effective number of contributing inputs in the representation magnitude. It adds no supervision, parameters, hidden dimensions, or explicit count features, and recovers standard attention at p=1. Across four continuous-time dynamic graph models and three datasets, MAA improves future-link AUC in 11 of 12 model-dataset cells. Linear recovery from the same hidden representation increases by 4.49% on average, and preferential-attachment recovery improves in all 12 cells after family-wise correction. We also observe consistent evidence in marked temporal point processes, temporal knowledge graphs, retrieval-augmented generation, and spatio-temporal point processes. Information accessibility and task utility remain distinct: NLL improves in MTPP, ranking is largely preserved in TKG, additional information in RAG does not improve the diagnostic head, and downstream LayerNorm can erase the signal in STPP. These results position MAA as a general normalization principle for improving predictor-facing representation informativeness by controlling repetition invariance in standard attention.
Minwoo Yu, Young-guk Ha
Jul 19, 2026cs.DB

SAGA: Synthetic Agentic Graph Architecture for Temporal Benchmark Generation

High quality temporal graph benchmarks with rich semantics and ground-truth anomaly labels are essential for training graph neural networks, yet remain scarce due to privacy constraints and annotation costs. We present SAGA (Synthetic Agentic Graph Architecture), a system for generating large-scale, semantically rich temporal graphs via a four-phase pipeline. Our Skeleton-First, Semantics-Second architecture decouples structure from semantics: (S) an O(1)-per-edge skeleton generator produces power-law graphs; (A) a dispatcher partitions causally ordered time blocks for parallel execution; (G) LLM agents inject domain semantics using RAG-based rule bases across four domains; and (A) a state alignment engine resolves conflicts via temporal replay, yielding anomaly labels as natural byproducts. Unlike structural generators (e.g., LDBC SNB, Kronecker/R-MAT) or purely LLM-based approaches, SAGA achieves structural realism, semantic richness, and automatic anomaly labeling in a unified framework. On a single H100 GPU with vLLM batching, SAGA generates 500,000 temporal edges with controlled anomalies in under 90 minutes, scaling to 100,000 nodes while maintaining clustering coefficients above 0.99. The system supports real-time pipeline visualization, interactive multi-domain tuning (Finance/AML, Network/IDS, Cyber/APT, Transportation), and a CLI for large-scale GPU-based experiments.
Jiacheng Ding, Xiaofei Zhang
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

Institutional Equity Holdings Prediction Using Node Affinities of Dynamic Graphs

Institutional equity holdings disclosed in SEC Form 13F filings provide a rich temporal record of portfolio decisions by large investment managers. However, forecasting future allocations and modeling future demand remains challenging due to disclosure lags, reporting noise, and strong persistence in institutional behavior. We introduce the first benchmark for these tasks using temporal graph machine learning, framing holdings prediction as node affinity prediction -- i.e., forecasting portfolio weights -- on a discrete-time temporal bipartite graph of managers and securities extracted from preprocessed filings. On a sampled dataset comprising 99 managers and the S&P 500 index (503 securities, 209,351 temporal edges across 48 quarters from 2013--2025), Node Affinity prediction model using Virtual State (NAVIS) achieves a state-of-the-art test Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) of 0.9127 with features (0.9121 without), outperforming all dynamic graph representation learning competitors by a substantial margin, and outperforming all heuristic methods. Remarkably, a simple Exponential Moving Average baseline achieves 0.8882, surpassing all dynamic graph models except NAVIS and all heuristics except Persistent Forecast (0.8891), highlighting the strong smoothness and persistence of institutional portfolios. Domain-specific node features provide only marginal gains (<1.2%), indicating that temporal and structural signals in the 13F ownership graph already capture most of the predictable information. By benchmarking a suite of Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB) models under the node affinity prediction setting, both with and without features, on real-world 13F data, this work provides a reproducible foundation for temporal graph machine learning in holdings prediction and portfolio allocation.
Emad Izadifar, Zahed Rahmati
Jul 4, 2026cs.LG

Towards the Explainability of Temporal Graph Networks via Memory Backtracking and Topological Attribution

Temporal graphs are ubiquitous in real-world applications and Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) have achieved superior predictive accuracy. Understanding which historical events drive model predictions can enhance trustworthiness of TGNs. Existing explanation methods overlook the memory module, the core component that records and updates node histories, leaving the influence of past events unexplored. To address this, we attribute TGNs predictions through the topology attribution tree and memory backtracking tree. The topology attribution tree captures the influence of neighbors and their memory vectors, then the memory backtracking tree quantifies how historical events shape node memory vectors. We apply the LRP in TGNs, ensuring that the total contribution of events equals the logits of model. Finally, top-k selection may be unfaithful due to the nonlinear mapping from logits to probabilities, we design optimization objectives to identify the important events. Experiments on nine temporal graph datasets, spanning node property prediction, link prediction tasks and graph classification tasks, show that our method provides faithful explanations and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yazhengliu/MemExplainer
Yazheng Liu, Xi Zhang, Sihong Xie +1
Jul 1, 2026cs.CL

TRACE: State-Aware Query Processing over Temporal Evidence Graphs for Conversational Data

Conversational data is increasingly used as a persistent source of user state for long-running assistants and AI agents. However, querying this data remains challenging because conversations naturally evolve: plans are revised, preferences change, and later messages frequently supersede or contradict earlier information. Existing long-memory pipelines largely treat memories as independent text or vector objects. This approach often retrieves semantically similar but stale evidence, offering limited support for state-aware reasoning. To address this problem, we present TRACE, a query processing framework over temporal evidence graphs for evolving conversational data. TRACE models conversations as a hierarchical graph spanning events, sessions, and topics, enriched with typed temporal, causal, update, and contradiction relations. Crucially, the framework maintains validity annotations so obsolete facts remain accessible for historical queries but are discounted for current-state answers. At query time, TRACE combines vector-based note retrieval with graph-guided evidence search, generating validity-aware support paths and a hybrid context for answer generation. This design separates lexical recall from evidence reconstruction, enabling bounded query-time reasoning over long conversational histories. Experiments on long-conversation query-answering (QA) benchmarks show that TRACE improves temporal and multi-hop reasoning, with ablations highlighting the importance of hierarchy, update-aware seeding, and path-grounded evidence.
Maolin Wang, Yu Wang, Zichun Liu +5
Jun 26, 2026cs.LG

Estimation-Prediction Tradeoff in Causal Probabilistic Temporal Graphs

Temporal link prediction (TLP) is typically evaluated by predictive performance on unseen edges, but this criterion can conflate predictive accuracy with recovery of the underlying causal mechanism. In stochastic models, Fisher information governs the Cramér--Rao (CR) bound on parameter estimation error: higher Fisher information permits more accurate parameter recovery. We show that, under comonotonicity conditions between Fisher information and entropy, binary logistic models exhibit an estimation--prediction tradeoff: regimes with higher Fisher information, and hence smaller CR bounds, also have higher irreducible predictive entropy. To study this tradeoff in TLP, we introduce a probabilistic causal generator for temporal graphs with transient edges and known ground-truth causal structure, and validate the phenomenon empirically.
Aniq Ur Rahman
Jun 15, 2026cs.CR

Timestamp-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning for Network Intrusion Detection

Given their effectiveness in modeling the relational structure among network traffic flows, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). However, most existing GNN-based NIDS approaches focus on the relational structure of traffic flows, and treat them as temporally independent, which limits their ability to cope with evolving attack behaviors. Moreover, their reliance on supervised or semi-supervised learning often restricts generalization to unseen attacks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised GNN-based framework. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is among the first self-supervised GNN-based NIDS models to explicitly leverage real timestamps, which provides faithful temporal dependencies for representation learning. We first construct a series of temporal graphs from network traffic flows according to their timestamps, and then employ an E-GraphSAGE and LSTM based encoder to fully extract temporal information and spatial dependencies of network traffic, without introducing time-costly attention mechanisms. A multi-view graph contrastive learning (GCL) scheme is introduced, where temporal, spatial, and feature contrasts are jointly performed to capture temporal continuity, preserve structural consistency, and improve the generalization and robustness of the learned representations, respectively. In addition, a gradient-norm-based adaptive weighting strategy is designed to optimize the contrastive loss weights. Experimental results on four representative NIDS datasets with real timestamps demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing self-supervised approaches and achieves performance comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art GNN method, while maintaining high computational efficiency.
Jianli Dai, Guangwei Wu, Jiacheng Li +3
Jun 13, 2026cs.CV

From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.
Bessie Dominguez-Dager, Francisco Gomez-Donoso, Miguel Cazorla +3
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

Intention Driven Identification of In-Possession Match Phases in Association Football through Temporal Graph Learning

Understanding tactical organisation in association football requires identifying in-possession match phases that are shaped by evolving tactical intentions rather than by spatial patterns alone. This study proposes an intention-driven framework for identifying phases from tracking data. Seven German Bundesliga matches recorded at 25 Hz with TRACAB were analysed. A hierarchical model was defined with three tactical intentions (Invade Opponent Space, Keep Possession, Scoring) and six phases (Build Up, Progression, Counter Attack, Maintenance, Sustained Threat, Finishing). A Temporal Graph Attention Network (T-GAN) combined frame-level player-interaction graphs, contextual features, and Transformer-based temporal modelling. Performance was evaluated using frame-level F1 and temporal Intersection over Union (tIoU). T-GAN achieved macro-average frame-level F1 scores of 0.87 at the intention level, 0.76 for invasion-related phases, and 0.79 for scoring phases. After filtering, mean class-wise tIoU increased from 0.44 to 0.67 for intentions and from 0.40 to 0.57 for phases, showing that sequence-level evaluation captured fragmentation and boundary errors missed by frame-level metrics. Model comparisons indicated that Transformer-based sequence modelling drove coherent segmentation, while graph-based relational modelling was most beneficial for Counter Attack. Misalignment analysis revealed common sequence level misalignments, mainly Build Up/Progression ambiguity, Build Up/Maintenance confusion, Counter Attack/Progression inconsistency, and shortened pre-shot Finishing segments. Overall, the framework translates tracking data into tactically interpretable phase representations for automated annotation, tactical analysis, and playing-style profiling.
Yuesen Li, Daniel Link
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

Geodesics of Dynamic Graphs for Regime Change Detection

Traditional change point detection in dynamic networks assumes abrupt transitions between stationary states, overlooking scenarios of continuous evolution which arise in most real-world applications, such as social networks or physical systems. We address this gap by formally defining regimes as periods of coherent dynamics in temporal graphs, which we characterize as trajectories along geodesics in a suitably defined graph space. This original perspective allows us to define regime changes as significant drifts in dynamics, either toward new trajectories or with pace changes. We leverage graph regression methods to measure the cumulative distance of sequences of observed graphs from the estimated geodesics between their endpoints, in the relevant graph space, which we can combine with change point detection algorithms. We present experiments on dynamic networks, with changing trajectories and varying speeds, in which we outperform state of the art change point detection models. Then, we analyse mobility data during the Covid-19 pandemic, and show that our assumptions on regular network evolution lead to change points that are more aligned to external events compared to the outcomes of baseline methods. Our work is the first to model and detect changes between evolving regimes in graph space, providing a realistic and powerful tool for analyzing complex temporal graph data.
William Cappelletti, Étienne Voutaz, Pascal Frossard
May 27, 2026cs.LG

Applications of temporal graph learning for predicting the dynamics of biological systems

Biological foundation models have shown strong performance in single-cell representation learning by applying transformer architectures directly to gene-expression matrices. However, these approaches predominantly operate in static settings and do not explicitly model the temporal evolution of developmental programs in the cell. Modeling such dynamics is important for understanding how cellular states progressively emerge, differentiate, and reorganize during development or disease progression. In this work-in-progress paper, we investigate an alternative temporal graph-based perspective in which cellular states are represented through pseudotime-resolved gene regulatory networks and modeled as evolving graph structures over persistent gene identities. Starting from single-cell transcriptomic data, we infer pseudotime trajectories, discretize cells into developmental snapshots, reconstruct one gene regulatory network per snapshot, and apply temporal graph neural networks to forecast biological states. We evaluate this framework on two publicly available mouse developmental datasets, erythroid gastrulation and pancreatic endocrinogenesis, considering three complementary tasks: gene-expression forecasting, link prediction, and out-degree centrality prediction. Our results show that graph-based models outperform well-known foundation-model such as scGPT and scFoundation, suggesting that explicitly modeling evolving regulatory structure provides useful information beyond static pretrained representations. For link prediction and centrality forecasting, temporal graph learning captures non-trivial regulatory dynamics and enables the identification of temporally important gene hubs. Overall, our findings support temporal graph learning as a promising direction for modeling dynamic biological systems and as a complementary paradigm to current foundation model approaches in single-cell biology.
Manuel Dileo, Andrea Sottoriva
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Learning Dynamic Graph Representations through Timespan View Contrasts

The rich information underlying graphs has inspired further investigation of unsupervised graph representation. Existing studies mainly depend on node features and topological properties within static graphs to create self-supervised signals, neglecting the temporal components carried by real-world graph data, such as timestamps of edges. To overcome this limitation, this paper explores how to model temporal evolution on dynamic graphs elegantly. Specifically, we introduce a new inductive bias, namely temporal translation invariance, which illustrates the tendency of the identical node to keep similar labels across different timespans. Based on this assumption, we develop a dynamic graph representation framework CLDG that encourages the node to maintain locally consistent temporal translation invariance through contrastive learning on different timespans. Except for standard CLDG which only considers explicit topological links, our further proposed CLDG++ additionally employs graph diffusion to uncover global contextual correlations between nodes, and designs a multi-scale contrastive learning objective composed of local-local, local-global, and global-global contrasts to enhance representation capabilities. Interestingly, by measuring the consistency between different timespans to shape anomaly indicators, CLDG and CLDG++ are seamlessly integrated with the task of spotting anomalies on dynamic graphs, which has broad applications in many high-impact domains, such as finance, cybersecurity, and healthcare. Experiments demonstrate that CLDG and CLDG++ both exhibit desirable performance in downstream tasks including node classification and dynamic graph anomaly detection. Moreover, CLDG significantly reduces time and space complexity by implicitly exploiting temporal cues instead of complicated sequence models.
Yiming Xu, Zhen Peng, Bin Shi +2
May 24, 2026cs.LG

TGFormer: Towards Temporal Graph Transformer with Auto-Correlation Mechanism

The growing interest in Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) stems from their ability to model complex dynamics and deliver superior performance. However, TGNNs encounter fundamental challenges in capturing long-term dependencies and identifying periodic patterns. To address these limitations, we propose TGFormer, a novel Transformer architecture specifically designed for temporal graphs. Our model redefines temporal graph learning by establishing a trajectory framework that aligns with time series analysis principles. This approach allows TGFormer to derive node representations through systematic analysis of historical interactions, enabling granular examination of node relationships across sequential timestamps. Building upon stochastic process theory, we develop an auto-correlation mechanism that systematically uncovers periodic dependencies in node interactions. This innovation empowers TGFormer to perform dependency discovery and representation aggregation at sub-interaction levels, demonstrating superior efficiency and accuracy compared to conventional attention mechanisms. Experimental validation across six public benchmarks confirms the effectiveness of our approach, with TGFormer at most achieving 9.35% precision improvement compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Hongjiang Chen, Pengfei Jiao, Ming Du +4
May 21, 2026quant-ph

A2QTGN: Adaptive Amplitude Quantum-Integrated Temporal Graph Network for Dynamic Link Prediction

Dynamic link prediction is important for modeling evolving interactions in complex systems, including social, communication, financial, and transportation networks. Classical temporal graph models capture sequential dependencies, but they may struggle to represent concurrent and rapidly changing node-edge interactions in large dynamic graphs. We propose A2QTGN (Adaptive Amplitude Quantum-Integrated Temporal Graph Network), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that combines adaptive amplitude encoding with a Temporal Graph Network backbone. The proposed mechanism represents node interaction features as quantum states and selectively refreshes amplitude embeddings based on temporal activity, preserving stable node states while emphasizing meaningful structural changes. This design reduces unnecessary quantum re-encoding and improves temporal representation for link prediction. Experiments on five Temporal Graph Benchmark datasets show that A2QTGN achieves strong predictive and ranking performance across diverse dynamic graphs. Ablation studies confirm the importance of both the quantum embedding module and the adaptive update strategy, while hardware-aware inference using a noisy backend and limited real-device execution supports the feasibility of near-term quantum-assisted temporal graph learning.
Nouhaila Innan, M. Murali Karthick, Simeon Kandan Sonar +2
May 15, 2026cs.SI

Conditional Entropy of Heat Diffusion on Temporal Networks

Many complex systems can be modeled by temporal networks, whose organization often evolves through distinct structural phases. Detecting the change points that delimit these phases is both important and challenging. In this work, we extend the conditional entropy of heat diffusion from static graphs to temporal networks and study its properties. We provide an upper bound and explain how discrepancies from it arise from the presence of asymmetric temporal paths. Moreover, we show that this quantity is monotone in time, yielding an information-theoretic analog of the second law of thermodynamics for inhomogeneous diffusion on temporal networks. We then introduce a local version of conditional entropy, designed to probe diffusion over finite temporal windows, and show that it provides an informative signal for change-point detection in continuous-time temporal networks. We evaluate the proposed methodology on synthetic benchmarks, including comparative experiments with existing nonparametric baselines in the snapshot setting, and then apply it to a real-world temporal contact network from a French primary school. Finally, we show how to use detected change points to perform community detection on targeted sub-intervals, improving the quality and interpretability of the clustering results.
Samuel Koovely, Alexandre Bovet
May 8, 2026cs.LG

PerCaM-Health: Personalized Dynamic Causal Graphs for Healthcare Reasoning

Personalized healthcare decisions require reasoning about how physiological and behavioral variables influence an individual patient over time. Existing temporal causal discovery methods are poorly matched to this setting: cohort-level models provide stable but non-personalized structures, while per-patient discovery is unreliable because individual trajectories are short, noisy, irregular, and non-stationary. This creates a fundamental gap between population-level causal modeling and the patient-specific, time-varying mechanisms needed for intervention reasoning. We introduce PerCaM-Health, a framework for learning personalized dynamic causal graphs from longitudinal health data. The framework learns a knowledge-guided population temporal graph, then conservatively adapts and evolves it using patient-specific temporal evidence and rolling-window updates, producing interpretable and auditable graph sequences. By coupling these graphs with temporal structural equations, the framework enables patient-level counterfactual queries, such as estimating short-horizon outcome changes under hypothetical behavioral interventions. Experiments on a semi-synthetic dynamic health benchmark show that PerCaM-Health improves graph recovery, dynamic edge tracking, and intervention direction accuracy compared to cohort-level, per-patient, and non-personalized temporal baselines. These results demonstrate that jointly modeling personalization and temporal evolution yields more reliable causal structure and intervention reasoning.
Elahe Khatibi, Ziyu Wang, Saba A. Farahani +4
May 1, 2026cs.CV

Static and Dynamic Graph Alignment Network for Temporal Video Grounding

Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) aims to localize temporal moments in an untrimmed video that semantically correspond to given natural language queries. Recently, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) have been widely adopted in TVG to model temporal relations among video clips and enhance contextual reasoning by constructing clip-level graphs. Despite their effectiveness, existing GCN-based TVG methods encounter three critical bottlenecks: 1) Most methods construct graph nodes using either static or dynamic features alone, resulting in incomplete visual representation and overlooking complementary semantics, 2) Most methods construct temporal graphs in a query-agnostic manner, leading to inefficient feature interaction within the temporal graph representation, and 3) Most methods often suffer from a single-granularity semantic matching, while direct training on complex temporal localization task may lead to slow convergence and suboptimal precision. To address these challenges, we propose Static and Dynamic Graph Alignment Network (SDGAN). First, SDGAN jointly exploits static and dynamic visual features to construct two complementary temporal graphs and performs Position-wise Nodes Alignment, enabling more expressive and robust visual representation. Second, SDGAN introduces Query-Clip Contrastive Learning and Adaptive Graph Modeling to explicitly align visual clips with their corresponding textual queries, yielding query-aware visual representations. Third, SDGAN incorporates multi-granularity temporal proposals within Progressive Easy-to-Hard Training Strategy, effectively bridging coarse-grained semantic localization and fine-grained temporal boundary refinement. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that SDGAN achieves superior performance across complex TVG scenarios. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/ZhanJieHu/SDGAN.
Zhanjie Hu, Bolin Zhang, Jianhua Wang +5
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

Multi-Level Temporal Graph Networks with Local-Global Fusion for Industrial Fault Diagnosis

Fault detection and diagnosis are critical for the optimal and safe operation of industrial processes. The correlations among sensors often display non-Euclidean structures where graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used therein. However, for large-scale systems, local, global, and dynamic relations extensively exist among sensors, and traditional GNNs often overlook such complex and multi-level structures for various problems including the fault diagnosis. To address this issue, we propose a structure-aware multi-level temporal graph network with local-global feature fusion for industrial fault diagnosis. First, a correlation graph is dynamically constructed using Pearson correlation coefficients to capture relationships among process variables. Then, temporal features are extracted through long short-term memory (LSTM)-based encoder, whereas the spatial dependencies among sensors are learned by graph convolution layers. A multi-level pooling mechanism is used to gradually coarsen and learn meaningful graph structures, to capture higher-level patterns while keeping important fault related details. Finally, a fusion step is applied to combine both detailed local features and overall global patterns before the final prediction. Experimental evaluations on the Tennessee Eastman process (TEP) demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior fault diagnosis performance, particularly for complex fault scenarios, outperforming various baseline methods.
Bibek Aryal, Gift Modekwe, Qiugang Lu
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
Oct 10, 2025cs.LG

What Do Temporal Graph Learning Models Learn?

Learning on temporal graphs has become a central topic in graph representation learning, with numerous benchmarks indicating the strong performance of state-of-the-art models. However, recent work has raised concerns about the reliability of benchmark results, noting issues with commonly used evaluation protocols and the surprising competitiveness of simple heuristics. This contrast raises the question of which characteristics of the underlying graphs temporal graph learning models actually use to form their predictions. We address this by systematically evaluating eight models on their ability to capture eight fundamental characteristics related to the link structure of temporal graphs. These include structural characteristics such as density, temporal patterns such as recency, and edge formation mechanisms such as homophily. Using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we analyze how well models learn these characteristics. Our findings reveal a mixed picture: models capture some characteristics well but fail to reproduce others. With this, we expose important limitations. Overall, we believe that our results provide practical insights for the application of temporal graph learning models and motivate more interpretability-driven evaluations in graph learning research.
Abigail J. Hayes, Tobias Schumacher, Markus Strohmaier
May 18, 2025cs.LG

Never Skip a Batch: Dense Learning of Temporal GNNs via Adaptive Pseudo-Supervision

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.
Alexander Panyshev, Dmitry Vinichenko, Oleg Travkin +2
Mar 22, 2024cs.CV

GCN-DevLSTM: Path Development for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition (SAR) in videos is an important but challenging task in computer vision. The recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) models for SAR are primarily based on graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs), which are powerful in extracting the spatial information from skeleton data. However, their ability to capture temporal dynamics remains limited. To address this, we propose the G-Dev layer, which leverages path development-a principled and parsimonious representation for sequential data based on Lie group structures-to enhance temporal modeling. By integrating the G-Dev layer, the proposed DevLSTM module summarizes local temporal dynamics, reducing the time dimension while retaining high-frequency information. It can be conveniently applied to any temporal graph data, complementing existing advanced GCN-based models. Our empirical studies on the NTU-60, NTU-120 and Chalearn2013 datasets demonstrate that our proposed GCN-DevLSTM network consistently improves the strong GCN baseline models and achieves competitive performance. The code repository is publicly available at https://github.com/DeepIntoStreams/GCN-DevLSTM.
Lei Jiang, Weixin Yang, Xin Zhang +1
Date pendingcs.MA

Certifying cooperation: a novel approach to cooperative multi-agent task generation

A shared reward gives agents a common objective, but leaves open when, how and even whether they must cooperate to succeed. We address these questions in the Laser Learning Environment, a multi-agent path-finding environment where cooperation materializes as one agent blocking a laser to let a teammate pass safely. We represent these interactions through temporal cooperation graphs whose timed edges connect helpers to beneficiaries, define six cooperation profiles as overlapping graph predicates, and prove that every cooperative trajectory satisfies at least one. By encoding the environment dynamics and profile predicates as propositional formulae, we distinguish tasks that admit}a profile in some winning trajectory from those that require it in every winning trajectory within a specified horizon. Used as filters, these queries turn a random layout sampler into a generator of tasks with certified cooperation requirements. Experiments with five multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms show that training diversity improves joint success on unseen tasks when cooperation-free solutions exist. When cooperation is required, greater diversity improves individual-agent exits, but joint success remains near zero. Across five profile-certified pools, final exit rates averaged over algorithms separate the pools into four statistically distinguishable levels but this ordering primarily reflects partial completion: policies collect rewards for individual exits but rarely exhibit the profile required for joint success. Our framework exposes this gap between rewarded partial completion and realized cooperation by certifying what cooperation successful completion requires and using temporal cooperation graphs to reveal what policies exhibit.
Yannick Molinghen, Hugo Charels, Tom Lenaerts