Negative sampling, which samples negative triplets from non-observed ones in knowledge graph (KG), is an essential step in KG embedding. Recently, generative adversarial network (GAN), has been introduced in negative sampling. By sampling negative triplets with large gradients, these methods avoid the problem of vanishing gradient and thus obtain better performance. However, they make the original model more complex and harder to train. In this paper, motivated by the observation that negative triplets with large gradients are important but rare, we propose to directly keep track of them with the cache. In this way, our method acts as a "distilled" version of previous GAN-based methods, which does not waste training time on additional parameters to fit the full distribution of negative triplets. However, how to sample from and update the cache are two critical questions. We propose to solve these issues by automated machine learning techniques. The automated version also covers GAN-based methods as special cases. Theoretical explanation of NSCaching is also provided, justifying the superior over fixed sampling scheme. Besides, we further extend NSCaching with skip-gram model for graph embedding. Finally, extensive experiments show that our method can gain significant improvements on various KG embedding models and the skip-gram model, and outperforms the state-of-the-art negative sampling methods.

Knowledge Graph (KG) embedding is a fundamental problem in data mining research with many real-world applications. It aims to encode the entities and relations in the graph into low dimensional vector space, which can be used for subsequent algorithms. Negative sampling, which samples negative triplets from non-observed ones in the training data, is an important step in KG embedding. Recently, generative adversarial network (GAN), has been introduced in negative sampling. By sampling negative triplets with large scores, these methods avoid the problem of vanishing gradient and thus obtain better performance. However, using GAN makes the original model more complex and hard to train, where reinforcement learning must be used. In this paper, motivated by the observation that negative triplets with large scores are important but rare, we propose to directly keep track of them with the cache. However, how to sample from and update the cache are two important questions. We carefully design the solutions, which are not only efficient but also achieve a good balance between exploration and exploitation. In this way, our method acts as a "distilled" version of previous GA-based methods, which does not waste training time on additional parameters to fit the full distribution of negative triplets. The extensive experiments show that our method can gain significant improvement in various KG embedding models, and outperform the state-of-the-art negative sampling methods based on GAN.

We introduce KBGAN, an adversarial learning framework to improve the performances of a wide range of existing knowledge graph embedding models. Because knowledge graphs typically only contain positive facts, sampling useful negative training examples is a non-trivial task. Replacing the head or tail entity of a fact with a uniformly randomly selected entity is a conventional method for generating negative facts, but the majority of the generated negative facts can be easily discriminated from positive facts, and will contribute little towards the training. Inspired by generative adversarial networks (GANs), we use one knowledge graph embedding model as a negative sample generator to assist the training of our desired model, which acts as the discriminator in GANs. This framework is independent of the concrete form of generator and discriminator, and therefore can utilize a wide variety of knowledge graph embedding models as its building blocks. In experiments, we adversarially train two translation-based models, TransE and TransD, each with assistance from one of the two probability-based models, DistMult and ComplEx. We evaluate the performances of KBGAN on the link prediction task, using three knowledge base completion datasets: FB15k-237, WN18 and WN18RR. Experimental results show that adversarial training substantially improves the performances of target embedding models under various settings.