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TempME: Towards the Explainability of Temporal Graph Neural Networks via Motif Discovery

Neural Information Processing Systems

Temporal graphs are widely used to model dynamic systems with time-varying interactions. In real-world scenarios, the underlying mechanisms of generating future interactions in dynamic systems are typically governed by a set of recurring substructures within the graph, known as temporal motifs. Despite the success and prevalence of current temporal graph neural networks (TGNN), it remains uncertain which temporal motifs are recognized as the significant indications that trigger a certain prediction from the model, which is a critical challenge for advancing the explainability and trustworthiness of current TGNNs.


Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Early Anomaly Detection and Performance Prediction via PV System Monitoring Data

Mukherjee, Srijani, Vuillon, Laurent, Nassif, Liliane Bou, Giroux-Julien, Stéphanie, Pabiou, Hervé, Dutykh, Denys, Tsanakas, Ionnasis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Effective performance prediction and timely anoma ly detection are paramount to ensuring the long - te rm efficiency, reliability, and economic viability of these systems. Traditional monitoring methods, often based on simple thresho lds or statistical rules, frequently fail to account for the complex interplay of environmental and operational variables that affect PV performance. These methods may lead to high rates of false positives or, more critically, miss subtle but significant a nomalies that can indicate underlying system faults. To overcome these limitations, advanced data - drive n approaches are essential. Machine learning and deep learning models have shown promise in this field, offering the ability to learn complex, non - linear relationships from vast datasets.


Leveraging Vulnerabilities in Temporal Graph Neural Networks via Strategic High-Impact Assaults

Jeon, Dong Hyun, Zhu, Lijing, Li, Haifang, Li, Pengze, Feng, Jingna, Duan, Tiehang, Song, Houbing Herbert, Tao, Cui, Niu, Shuteng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have become indispensable for analyzing dynamic graphs in critical applications such as social networks, communication systems, and financial networks. However, the robustness of TGNNs against adversarial attacks, particularly sophisticated attacks that exploit the temporal dimension, remains a significant challenge. Existing attack methods for Spatio-Temporal Dynamic Graphs (STDGs) often rely on simplistic, easily detectable perturbations (e.g., random edge additions/deletions) and fail to strategically target the most influential nodes and edges for maximum impact. We introduce the High Impact Attack (HIA), a novel restricted black-box attack framework specifically designed to overcome these limitations and expose critical vulnerabilities in TGNNs. HIA leverages a data-driven surrogate model to identify structurally important nodes (central to network connectivity) and dynamically important nodes (critical for the graph's temporal evolution). It then employs a hybrid perturbation strategy, combining strategic edge injection (to create misleading connections) and targeted edge deletion (to disrupt essential pathways), maximizing TGNN performance degradation. Importantly, HIA minimizes the number of perturbations to enhance stealth, making it more challenging to detect. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world datasets and four representative TGNN architectures (TGN, JODIE, DySAT, and TGAT) demonstrate that HIA significantly reduces TGNN accuracy on the link prediction task, achieving up to a 35.55% decrease in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) - a substantial improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. These results highlight fundamental vulnerabilities in current STDG models and underscore the urgent need for robust defenses that account for both structural and temporal dynamics.


Higher-order Structure Boosts Link Prediction on Temporal Graphs

Liu, Jingzhe, Hua, Zhigang, Xie, Yan, Li, Bingheng, Shomer, Harry, Song, Yu, Hassani, Kaveh, Tang, Jiliang

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have gained growing attention for modeling and predicting structures in temporal graphs. However, existing TGNNs primarily focus on pairwise interactions while overlooking higher-order structures that are integral to link formation and evolution in real-world temporal graphs. Meanwhile, these models often suffer from efficiency bottlenecks, further limiting their expressive power. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Higher-order structure Temporal Graph Neural Network, which incorporates hypergraph representations into temporal graph learning. In particular, we develop an algorithm to identify the underlying higher-order structures, enhancing the model's ability to capture the group interactions. Furthermore, by aggregating multiple edge features into hyperedge representations, HTGN effectively reduces memory cost during training. We theoretically demonstrate the enhanced expressiveness of our approach and validate its effectiveness and efficiency through extensive experiments on various real-world temporal graphs. Experimental results show that HTGN achieves superior performance on dynamic link prediction while reducing memory costs by up to 50\% compared to existing methods.


TempME: Towards the Explainability of Temporal Graph Neural Networks via Motif Discovery

Neural Information Processing Systems

Temporal graphs are widely used to model dynamic systems with time-varying interactions. In real-world scenarios, the underlying mechanisms of generating future interactions in dynamic systems are typically governed by a set of recurring substructures within the graph, known as temporal motifs. Despite the success and prevalence of current temporal graph neural networks (TGNN), it remains uncertain which temporal motifs are recognized as the significant indications that trigger a certain prediction from the model, which is a critical challenge for advancing the explainability and trustworthiness of current TGNNs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, called Temporal Motifs Explainer (TempME), which uncovers the most pivotal temporal motifs guiding the prediction of TGNNs. Derived from the information bottleneck principle, TempME extracts the most interaction-related motifs while minimizing the amount of contained information to preserve the sparsity and succinctness of the explanation.


Towards Ideal Temporal Graph Neural Networks: Evaluations and Conclusions after 10,000 GPU Hours

Yang, Yuxin, Zhou, Hongkuan, Kannan, Rajgopal, Prasanna, Viktor

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for modeling dynamic interactions across various domains. The design space of TGNNs is notably complex, given the unique challenges in runtime efficiency and scalability raised by the evolving nature of temporal graphs. We contend that many of the existing works on TGNN modeling inadequately explore the design space, leading to suboptimal designs. Viewing TGNN models through a performance-focused lens often obstructs a deeper understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Specifically, benchmarking efforts inherently evaluate models in their original designs and implementations, resulting in unclear accuracy comparisons and misleading runtime. To address these shortcomings, we propose a practical comparative evaluation framework that performs a design space search across well-known TGNN modules based on a unified, optimized code implementation. Using our framework, we make the first efforts towards addressing three critical questions in TGNN design, spending over 10,000 GPU hours: (1) investigating the efficiency of TGNN module designs, (2) analyzing how the effectiveness of these modules correlates with dataset patterns, and (3) exploring the interplay between multiple modules. Key outcomes of this directed investigative approach include demonstrating that the most recent neighbor sampling and attention aggregator outperform uniform neighbor sampling and MLP-Mixer aggregator; Assessing static node memory as an effective node memory alternative, and showing that the choice between static or dynamic node memory should be based on the repetition patterns in the dataset. Our in-depth analysis of the interplay between TGNN modules and dataset patterns should provide a deeper insight into TGNN performance along with potential research directions for designing more general and effective TGNNs.


Temporal-Aware Evaluation and Learning for Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Su, Junwei, Wu, Shan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) are a family of graph neural networks designed to model and learn dynamic information from temporal graphs. Given their substantial empirical success, there is an escalating interest in TGNNs within the research community. However, the majority of these efforts have been channelled towards algorithm and system design, with the evaluation metrics receiving comparatively less attention. Effective evaluation metrics are crucial for providing detailed performance insights, particularly in the temporal domain. This paper investigates the commonly used evaluation metrics for TGNNs and illustrates the failure mechanisms of these metrics in capturing essential temporal structures in the predictive behaviour of TGNNs. We provide a mathematical formulation of existing performance metrics and utilize an instance-based study to underscore their inadequacies in identifying volatility clustering (the occurrence of emerging errors within a brief interval). This phenomenon has profound implications for both algorithm and system design in the temporal domain. To address this deficiency, we introduce a new volatility-aware evaluation metric (termed volatility cluster statistics), designed for a more refined analysis of model temporal performance. Additionally, we demonstrate how this metric can serve as a temporal-volatility-aware training objective to alleviate the clustering of temporal errors. Through comprehensive experiments on various TGNN models, we validate our analysis and the proposed approach. The empirical results offer revealing insights: 1) existing TGNNs are prone to making errors with volatility clustering, and 2) TGNNs with different mechanisms to capture temporal information exhibit distinct volatility clustering patterns. Our empirical findings demonstrate that our proposed training objective effectively reduces volatility clusters in error.


Retrofitting Temporal Graph Neural Networks with Transformer

Huang, Qiang, Yan, Xiao, Wang, Xin, Rao, Susie Xi, Han, Zhichao, Fu, Fangcheng, Zhang, Wentao, Jiang, Jiawei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) outperform regular GNNs by incorporating time information into graph-based operations. However, TGNNs adopt specialized models (e.g., TGN, TGAT, and APAN ) and require tailored training frameworks (e.g., TGL and ETC). In this paper, we propose TF-TGN, which uses Transformer decoder as the backbone model for TGNN to enjoy Transformer's codebase for efficient training. In particular, Transformer achieves tremendous success for language modeling, and thus the community developed high-performance kernels (e.g., flash-attention and memory-efficient attention) and efficient distributed training schemes (e.g., PyTorch FSDP, DeepSpeed, and Megatron-LM). We observe that TGNN resembles language modeling, i.e., the message aggregation operation between chronologically occurring nodes and their temporal neighbors in TGNNs can be structured as sequence modeling. Beside this similarity, we also incorporate a series of algorithm designs including suffix infilling, temporal graph attention with self-loop, and causal masking self-attention to make TF-TGN work. During training, existing systems are slow in transforming the graph topology and conducting graph sampling. As such, we propose methods to parallelize the CSR format conversion and graph sampling. We also adapt Transformer codebase to train TF-TGN efficiently with multiple GPUs. We experiment with 9 graphs and compare with 2 state-of-the-art TGNN training frameworks. The results show that TF-TGN can accelerate training by over 2.20 while providing comparable or even superior accuracy to existing SOTA TGNNs. TF-TGN is available at https://github.com/qianghuangwhu/TF-TGN.


Virtual Sensor for Real-Time Bearing Load Prediction Using Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Zhao, Mengjie, Taal, Cees, Baggerohr, Stephan, Fink, Olga

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate bearing load monitoring is essential for their Prognostics and Health Management (PHM), enabling damage assessment, wear prediction, and proactive maintenance. While bearing sensors are typically placed on the bearing housing, direct load monitoring requires sensors inside the bearing itself. Recently introduced sensor rollers enable direct bearing load monitoring but are constrained by their battery life. Data-driven virtual sensors can learn from sensor roller data collected during a batterys lifetime to map operating conditions to bearing loads. Although spatially distributed bearing sensors offer insights into load distribution (e.g., correlating temperature with load), traditional machine learning algorithms struggle to fully exploit these spatial-temporal dependencies. To address this gap, we introduce a graph-based virtual sensor that leverages Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to analyze spatial-temporal dependencies among sensor signals, mapping existing measurements (temperature, vibration) to bearing loads. Since temperature and vibration signals exhibit vastly different dynamics, we propose Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Networks (HTGNN), which explicitly models these signal types and their interactions for effective load prediction. Our results demonstrate that HTGNN outperforms Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which struggle to capture both spatial and heterogeneous signal characteristics. These findings highlight the importance of capturing the complex spatial interactions between temperature, vibration, and load.


Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Irregular Data

Oskarsson, Joel, Sidén, Per, Lindsten, Fredrik

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper proposes a temporal graph neural network model for forecasting of graph-structured irregularly observed time series. Our TGNN4I model is designed to handle both irregular time steps and partial observations of the graph. This is achieved by introducing a time-continuous latent state in each node, following a linear Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) defined by the output of a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). The ODE has an explicit solution as a combination of exponential decay and periodic dynamics. Observations in the graph neighborhood are taken into account by integrating graph neural network layers in both the GRU state update and predictive model. The time-continuous dynamics additionally enable the model to make predictions at arbitrary time steps. We propose a loss function that leverages this and allows for training the model for forecasting over different time horizons. Experiments on simulated data and real-world data from traffic and climate modeling validate the usefulness of both the graph structure and time-continuous dynamics in settings with irregular observations.