Time is an important dimension in our physical world. Lots of facts can evolve with respect to time. For example, the U.S. President might change every four years. Therefore, it is important to consider the time dimension and empower the existing QA models to reason over time. However, the existing QA datasets contain rather few time-sensitive questions, hence not suitable for diagnosing or benchmarking the model's temporal reasoning capability. In order to promote research in this direction, we propose to construct a time-sensitive QA dataset. The dataset is constructed by 1) mining time-evolving facts from WikiData and align them to their corresponding Wikipedia page, 2) employing crowd workers to verify and calibrate these noisy facts, 3) generating question-answer pairs based on the annotated time-sensitive facts. Our dataset poses two novel challenges: 1) the model needs to understand both explicit and implicit mention of time information in the long document, 2) the model needs to perform temporal reasoning like comparison, addition, subtraction. We evaluate different SoTA long-document QA systems like BigBird and FiD on our dataset. The best-performing model FiD can only achieve 46\% accuracy, still far behind the human performance of 87\%. We demonstrate that these models are still lacking the ability to perform robust temporal understanding and reasoning. Therefore, we believe that our dataset could serve as a benchmark to empower future studies in temporal reasoning. The dataset and code are released in~\url{https://github.com/wenhuchen/Time-Sensitive-QA}.

The inclusion of temporal scopes of facts in knowledge graph embedding (KGE) presents significant opportunities for improving the resulting embeddings, and consequently for increased performance in downstream applications. Yet, little research effort has focussed on this area and much of the carried out research reports only marginally improved results compared to models trained without temporal scopes (static models). Furthermore, rather than leveraging existing work on static models, they introduce new models specific to temporal knowledge graphs. We propose a novel perspective that takes advantage of the power of existing static embedding models by focussing effort on manipulating the data instead. Our method, SpliMe, draws inspiration from the field of signal processing and early work in graph embedding. We show that SpliMe competes with or outperforms the current state of the art in temporal KGE. Additionally, we uncover issues with the procedure currently used to assess the performance of static models on temporal graphs and introduce two ways to counteract them.

Take a look at the video above and the associated question – What did they hold before opening the closet?. After looking at the video, you can easily answer that the person is holding a phone. People have a remarkable ability to comprehend visual events in new videos and to answer questions about that video. For instance, the person initially holds a phone and then opens the closet and takes out a picture. To answer this question, we need to recognize the action "opening the closet" and then understand how "before" should restrict our search for the answer to events before this action.

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) have been developed and used in many different areas. Reasoning on TKGs that predicts potential facts (events) in the future brings great challenges to existing models. When facing a prediction task, human beings usually search useful historical information (i.e., clues) in their memories and then reason for future meticulously. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose CluSTeR to predict future facts in a two-stage manner, Clue Searching and Temporal Reasoning, accordingly. Specifically, at the clue searching stage, CluSTeR learns a beam search policy via reinforcement learning (RL) to induce multiple clues from historical facts. At the temporal reasoning stage, it adopts a graph convolution network based sequence method to deduce answers from clues. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the substantial advantages of CluSTeR compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the clues found by CluSTeR further provide interpretability for the results.

Reasoning in a temporal knowledge graph (TKG) is a critical task for information retrieval and semantic search. It is particularly challenging when the TKG is updated frequently. The model has to adapt to changes in the TKG for efficient training and inference while preserving its performance on historical knowledge. Recent work approaches TKG completion (TKGC) by augmenting the encoder-decoder framework with a time-aware encoding function. However, naively fine-tuning the model at every time step using these methods does not address the problems of 1) catastrophic forgetting, 2) the model's inability to identify the change of facts (e.g., the change of the political affiliation and end of a marriage), and 3) the lack of training efficiency. To address these challenges, we present the Time-aware Incremental Embedding (TIE) framework, which combines TKG representation learning, experience replay, and temporal regularization. We introduce a set of metrics that characterizes the intransigence of the model and propose a constraint that associates the deleted facts with negative labels. Experimental results on Wikidata12k and YAGO11k datasets demonstrate that the proposed TIE framework reduces training time by about ten times and improves on the proposed metrics compared to vanilla full-batch training. It comes without a significant loss in performance for any traditional measures. Extensive ablation studies reveal performance trade-offs among different evaluation metrics, which is essential for decision-making around real-world TKG applications.

Knowledge Graph (KG) reasoning that predicts missing facts for incomplete KGs has been widely explored. However, reasoning over Temporal KG (TKG) that predicts facts in the future is still far from resolved. The key to predict future facts is to thoroughly understand the historical facts. A TKG is actually a sequence of KGs corresponding to different timestamps, where all concurrent facts in each KG exhibit structural dependencies and temporally adjacent facts carry informative sequential patterns. To capture these properties effectively and efficiently, we propose a novel Recurrent Evolution network based on Graph Convolution Network (GCN), called RE-GCN, which learns the evolutional representations of entities and relations at each timestamp by modeling the KG sequence recurrently. Specifically, for the evolution unit, a relation-aware GCN is leveraged to capture the structural dependencies within the KG at each timestamp. In order to capture the sequential patterns of all facts in parallel, the historical KG sequence is modeled auto-regressively by the gate recurrent components. Moreover, the static properties of entities such as entity types, are also incorporated via a static graph constraint component to obtain better entity representations. Fact prediction at future timestamps can then be realized based on the evolutional entity and relation representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the RE-GCN model obtains substantial performance and efficiency improvement for the temporal reasoning tasks on six benchmark datasets. Especially, it achieves up to 11.46\% improvement in MRR for entity prediction with up to 82 times speedup comparing to the state-of-the-art baseline.

Spatial-temporal reasoning is a challenging task in Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to its demanding but unique nature: a theoretic requirement on representing and reasoning based on spatial-temporal knowledge in mind, and an applied requirement on a high-level cognitive system capable of navigating and acting in space and time. Recent works have focused on an abstract reasoning task of this kind -- Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Despite the encouraging progress on RPM that achieves human-level performance in terms of accuracy, modern approaches have neither a treatment of human-like reasoning on generalization, nor a potential to generate answers. To fill in this gap, we propose a neuro-symbolic Probabilistic Abduction and Execution (PrAE) learner; central to the PrAE learner is the process of probabilistic abduction and execution on a probabilistic scene representation, akin to the mental manipulation of objects. Specifically, we disentangle perception and reasoning from a monolithic model. The neural visual perception frontend predicts objects' attributes, later aggregated by a scene inference engine to produce a probabilistic scene representation. In the symbolic logical reasoning backend, the PrAE learner uses the representation to abduce the hidden rules. An answer is predicted by executing the rules on the probabilistic representation. The entire system is trained end-to-end in an analysis-by-synthesis manner without any visual attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the PrAE learner improves cross-configuration generalization and is capable of rendering an answer, in contrast to prior works that merely make a categorical choice from candidates.

Learning node representation on dynamically-evolving, multi-relational graph data has gained great research interest. However, most of the existing models for temporal knowledge graph forecasting use Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with discrete depth to capture temporal information, while time is a continuous variable. Inspired by Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE), we extend the idea of continuum-depth models to time-evolving multi-relational graph data, and propose a novel Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting model with NODE. Our model captures temporal information through NODE and structural information through a Graph Neural Network (GNN). Thus, our graph ODE model achieves a continuous model in time and efficiently learns node representation for future prediction. We evaluate our model on six temporal knowledge graph datasets by performing link forecasting. Experiment results show the superiority of our model.

Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) inherently reflect the transient nature of real-world knowledge, as opposed to static knowledge graphs. Naturally, automatic TKG completion has drawn much research interests for a more realistic modeling of relational reasoning. However, most of the existing mod-els for TKG completion extend static KG embeddings that donot fully exploit TKG structure, thus lacking in 1) account-ing for temporally relevant events already residing in the lo-cal neighborhood of a query, and 2) path-based inference that facilitates multi-hop reasoning and better interpretability. In this paper, we propose T-GAP, a novel model for TKG completion that maximally utilizes both temporal information and graph structure in its encoder and decoder. T-GAP encodes query-specific substructure of TKG by focusing on the temporal displacement between each event and the query times-tamp, and performs path-based inference by propagating attention through the graph. Our empirical experiments demonstrate that T-GAP not only achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art baselines, but also competently generalizes to queries with unseen timestamps. Through extensive qualitative analyses, we also show that T-GAP enjoys from transparent interpretability, and follows human intuition in its reasoning process.

Large knowledge graphs often grow to store temporal facts that model the dynamic relations or interactions of entities along the timeline. Since such temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incompleteness, it is important to develop time-aware representation learning models that help to infer the missing temporal facts. While the temporal facts are typically evolving, it is observed that many facts often show a repeated pattern along the timeline, such as economic crises and diplomatic activities. This observation indicates that a model could potentially learn much from the known facts appeared in history. To this end, we propose a new representation learning model for temporal knowledge graphs, namely CyGNet, based on a novel timeaware copy-generation mechanism. CyGNet is not only able to predict future facts from the whole entity vocabulary, but also capable of identifying facts with repetition and accordingly predicting such future facts with reference to the known facts in the past. We evaluate the proposed method on the knowledge graph completion task using five benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CyGNet for predicting future facts with repetition as well as de novo fact prediction.