Temporal Reasoning
Learning to Fuse Temporal Proximity Networks: A Case Study in Chimpanzee Social Interactions
He, Yixuan, Sandel, Aaron, Wipf, David, Cucuringu, Mihai, Mitani, John, Reinert, Gesine
How can we identify groups of primate individuals which could be conjectured to drive social structure? To address this question, one of us has collected a time series of data for social interactions between chimpanzees. Here we use a network representation, leading to the task of combining these data into a time series of a single weighted network per time stamp, where different proximities should be given different weights reflecting their relative importance. We optimize these proximity-type weights in a principled way, using an innovative loss function which rewards structural consistency across time. The approach is empirically validated by carefully designed synthetic data. Using statistical tests, we provide a way of identifying groups of individuals that stay related for a significant length of time. Applying the approach to the chimpanzee data set, we detect cliques in the animal social network time series, which can be validated by real-world intuition from prior research and qualitative observations by chimpanzee experts.
TFLEX: Temporal Feature-Logic Embedding Framework for Complex Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graph
Multi-hop logical reasoning over knowledge graph plays a fundamental role in many artificial intelligence tasks. Recent complex query embedding methods for reasoning focus on static KGs, while temporal knowledge graphs have not been fully explored. Reasoning over TKGs has two challenges: 1. The query should answer entities or timestamps; 2. The operators should consider both set logic on entity set and temporal logic on timestamp set.To bridge this gap, we introduce the multi-hop logical reasoning problem on TKGs and then propose the first temporal complex query embedding named Temporal Feature-Logic Embedding framework (TFLEX) to answer the temporal complex queries. Specifically, we utilize fuzzy logic to compute the logic part of the Temporal Feature-Logic embedding, thus naturally modeling all first-order logic operations on the entity set.
TimelineKGQA: A Comprehensive Question-Answer Pair Generator for Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Sun, Qiang, Li, Sirui, Huynh, Du, Reynolds, Mark, Liu, Wei
Question answering over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is crucial for understanding evolving facts and relationships, yet its development is hindered by limited datasets and difficulties in generating custom QA pairs. We propose a novel categorization framework based on timeline-context relationships, along with \textbf{TimelineKGQA}, a universal temporal QA generator applicable to any TKGs. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/PascalSun/TimelineKGQA} as an open source Python package.
Towards Pattern-aware Data Augmentation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Zhang, Jiasheng, Ouyang, Deqiang, Liang, Shuang, Shao, Jie
Predicting missing facts for temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is a fundamental task, called temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC). One key challenge in this task is the imbalance in data distribution, where facts are unevenly spread across entities and timestamps. This imbalance can lead to poor completion performance or long-tail entities and timestamps, and unstable training due to the introduction of false negative samples. Unfortunately, few previous studies have investigated how to mitigate these effects. Moreover, for the first time, we found that existing methods suffer from model preferences, revealing that entities with specific properties (e.g., recently active) are favored by different models. Such preferences will lead to error accumulation and further exacerbate the effects of imbalanced data distribution, but are overlooked by previous studies. To alleviate the impacts of imbalanced data and model preferences, we introduce Booster, the first data augmentation strategy for TKGs. The unique requirements here lie in generating new samples that fit the complex semantic and temporal patterns within TKGs, and identifying hard-learning samples specific to models. Therefore, we propose a hierarchical scoring algorithm based on triadic closures within TKGs. By incorporating both global semantic patterns and local time-aware structures, the algorithm enables pattern-aware validation for new samples. Meanwhile, we propose a two-stage training approach to identify samples that deviate from the model's preferred patterns. With a well-designed frequency-based filtering strategy, this approach also helps to avoid the misleading of false negatives. Experiments justify that Booster can seamlessly adapt to existing TKGC models and achieve up to an 8.7% performance improvement.
Temporal reasoning for timeline summarisation in social media
Song, Jiayu, Akhter, Mahmud, Slonim, Dana Atzil, Liakata, Maria
This paper explores whether enhancing temporal reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) can improve the quality of timeline summarization, the task of summarising long texts containing sequences of events, particularly social media threads . We introduce \textit{NarrativeReason}, a novel dataset focused on temporal relationships among sequential events within narratives, distinguishing it from existing temporal reasoning datasets that primarily address pair-wise event relationships. Our approach then combines temporal reasoning with timeline summarization through a knowledge distillation framework, where we first fine-tune a teacher model on temporal reasoning tasks and then distill this knowledge into a student model while simultaneously training it for the task of timeline summarization. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance on mental health-related timeline summarization tasks, which involve long social media threads with repetitions of events and a mix of emotions, highlighting the importance of leveraging temporal reasoning to improve timeline summarisation.
Hawkes based Representation Learning for Reasoning over Scale-free Community-structured Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Du, Yuwei, Liu, Xinyue, Liang, Wenxin, Zong, Linlin, Zhang, Xianchao
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning has become a hot topic due to its great value in many practical tasks. The key to TKG reasoning is modeling the structural information and evolutional patterns of the TKGs. While great efforts have been devoted to TKG reasoning, the structural and evolutional characteristics of real-world networks have not been considered. In the aspect of structure, real-world networks usually exhibit clear community structure and scale-free (long-tailed distribution) properties. In the aspect of evolution, the impact of an event decays with the time elapsing. In this paper, we propose a novel TKG reasoning model called Hawkes process-based Evolutional Representation Learning Network (HERLN), which learns structural information and evolutional patterns of a TKG simultaneously, considering the characteristics of real-world networks: community structure, scale-free and temporal decaying. First, we find communities in the input TKG to make the encoding get more similar intra-community embeddings. Second, we design a Hawkes process-based relational graph convolutional network to cope with the event impact-decaying phenomenon. Third, we design a conditional decoding method to alleviate biases towards frequent entities caused by long-tailed distribution. Experimental results show that HERLN achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art models.
STKDRec: Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Distillation for Takeaway Recommendation
Zhao, Shuyuan, Chen, Wei, Shi, Boyan, Zhou, Liyong, Lin, Shuohao, Wan, Huaiyu
The takeaway recommendation system is designed to recommend users' future takeaway purchases based on their historical purchase behaviors, thereby improving user satisfaction and increasing merchant sales. Existing methods focus on incorporating auxiliary information or leveraging knowledge graphs to alleviate the sparsity issue of user purchase sequence data. However, two main challenges limit the performance of these approaches: (1) how to capture dynamic user preferences on complex geospatial information and (2) how to efficiently integrate spatial-temporal knowledge from graphs and sequence data with low calculation costs. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal knowledge distillation for takeaway recommendation model (STKDRec) based on the two-stage training process. Specifically, during the first pre-training stage, a spatial-temporal knowledge graph (STKG) encoder is pre-trained to extract the high-order spatial-temporal and collaborative associations within the STKG. During the second STKD stage, a spatial-temporal Transformer is employed to comprehensively model dynamic user preferences on various types of fine-grained geospatial information from a sequence perspective. Furthermore, the STKD strategy is introduced to adaptively fuse the rich spatial-temporal knowledge from the pre-trained STKG encoder and the spatial-temporal transformer while reducing the cost of model training. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our STKDRec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at:https://github.com/Zhaoshuyuan0246/STKDRec.
CognTKE: A Cognitive Temporal Knowledge Extrapolation Framework
Chen, Wei, Wu, Yuting, Wu, Shuhan, Zhang, Zhiyu, Liao, Mengqi, Lin, Youfang, Wan, Huaiyu
Reasoning future unknowable facts on temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is a challenging task, holding significant academic and practical values for various fields. Existing studies exploring explainable reasoning concentrate on modeling comprehensible temporal paths relevant to the query. Yet, these path-based methods primarily focus on local temporal paths appearing in recent times, failing to capture the complex temporal paths in TKG and resulting in the loss of longer historical relations related to the query. Motivated by the Dual Process Theory in cognitive science, we propose a \textbf{Cogn}itive \textbf{T}emporal \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{E}xtrapolation framework (CognTKE), which introduces a novel temporal cognitive relation directed graph (TCR-Digraph) and performs interpretable global shallow reasoning and local deep reasoning over the TCR-Digraph. Specifically, the proposed TCR-Digraph is constituted by retrieving significant local and global historical temporal relation paths associated with the query. In addition, CognTKE presents the global shallow reasoner and the local deep reasoner to perform global one-hop temporal relation reasoning (System 1) and local complex multi-hop path reasoning (System 2) over the TCR-Digraph, respectively. The experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that CognTKE achieves significant improvement in accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baselines and delivers excellent zero-shot reasoning ability. \textit{The code is available at https://github.com/WeiChen3690/CognTKE}.
DECRL: A Deep Evolutionary Clustering Jointed Temporal Knowledge Graph Representation Learning Approach
Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) representation learning aims to map temporal evolving entities and relations to embedded representations in a continuous low-dimensional vector space. However, existing approaches cannot capture the temporal evolution of high-order correlations in TKGs. To this end, we propose a Deep Evolutionary Clustering jointed temporal knowledge graph Representation Learning approach (DECRL). Specifically, a deep evolutionary clustering module is proposed to capture the temporal evolution of high-order correlations among entities. Furthermore, a cluster-aware unsupervised alignment mechanism is introduced to ensure the precise one-to-one alignment of soft overlapping clusters across timestamps, thereby maintaining the temporal smoothness of clusters. In addition, an implicit correlation encoder is introduced to capture latent correlations between any pair of clusters under the guidance of a global graph. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that DECRL achieves the state-of-the-art performances, outperforming the best baseline by an average of 9.53%, 12.98%, 10.42%, and 14.68% in MRR, Hits@1, Hits@3, and Hits@10, respectively.
Enhancing Temporal Link Prediction with HierTKG: A Hierarchical Temporal Knowledge Graph Framework
Almutairi, Mariam, Aktas, Melike Yildiz, Wali, Nawar, Mitra, Shutonu, Zhou, Dawei
To address this, we propose HierTKG, a framework combining Temporal Graph Networks (TGN) and hierarchical pooling (DiffPool) to model rumor dynamics across temporal and structural scales. HierTKG captures key propagation phases, enabling improved temporal link prediction and actionable insights for misinformation control. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness, achieving an MRR of 0.9845 on ICEWS14 and 0.9312 on WikiData, with competitive performance on noisy datasets like PHEME (MRR: 0.8802). By modeling structured event sequences and dynamic social interactions, HierTKG adapts to diverse propagation patterns, offering a scalable and robust solution for real-time analysis and prediction of rumor spread, aiding proactive intervention strategies.