Class-imbalanced node classification on temporal graphs is challenging because majority-dominated temporal propagation progressively assimilates minority representations, while conventional node and neighborhood information provides insufficient discriminative evidence for minority classes. To address these issues, we propose MDTE, a minority-aware diffusion framework that reconstructs stable and discriminative temporal edge-event representations through conditional diffusion denoising. Specifically, MDTE introduces Distribution-Aware Selective Propagation, which combines Local Outlier Factor (LOF)-based propagation filtering with cluster-aware low-frequency propagation. The module preserves informative neighborhood dependencies while mitigating harmful propagation and majority-class information assimilation. It further develops Multi-View Discriminative Fusion, which exploits feature reconstruction and topology prediction to characterize class-wise differences in distribution learning and extracts complementary discriminability signals to guide denoising. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that MDTE consistently achieves the best performance on minority-class-oriented metrics, improving minority-class recall by up to 23.53 percentage points, minority-class F1 by 8.68 percentage points, and AUPRC by 2.67 percentage points over the strongest baselines.
Progress in streaming, edge-level graph anomaly detection (GAD) has been marked by increasingly elaborate architectures, from count-min-sketch chi square tests to memory-augmented attention networks. Yet the empirical gains attributable to this added complexity have not been systematically evaluated. We propose SimpleCount, a reference with no parameter fitting that selects one scalar feature per dataset from a fixed pool of counts, recencies, first-occurrence indicators, and count-derived transforms. We compare SimpleCount with two temporal-graph detector models and an IsoForest control fitted to the complete feature vector across five public datasets and one synthetic dataset. SimpleCount matches or exceeds SLADE on three of six datasets and exceeds IsoForest on all six. We report paired statistical tests and five-seed SLADE evaluations. SLADE requires 23 to 133x more wall-clock time than SimpleCount. On Synth-Triangle and an additional Synth-Quad probe, pre-event structural scores recover the planted signal at AUC up to 0.955, while all evaluated detector models remain near random. The benefit of complexity is dataset-dependent, and every claimed gain should be reported against a strong one-feature reference together with its compute cost.
Conformal prediction (CP) provides distribution-free coverage guarantees and has emerged as a principled tool for uncertainty quantification. In edge-level fraud detection on temporal interaction graphs, where false positives and false negatives both carry substantial cost, such coverage guarantees are particularly appealing for risk-aware decision making. However, directly applying existing graph conformal predictors yields inefficient prediction sets due to two recurring properties of fraud data. Fraudulent interactions are often embedded in benign-dominated neighborhoods that dilute calibration signals, while extreme class imbalance leaves scarce labeled-fraud support in the calibration split and leads to overly conservative class-conditional thresholds. To address these issues, we propose ProtoCP, a conformal prediction framework for edge-level fraud detection on temporal graphs. ProtoCP improves calibration efficiency by focusing calibration on fraud-relevant subgraph context and producing more stable nonconformity scores under class imbalance and temporal drift. Specifically, it leverages learned prototypes to suppress benign-dominated noise in the calibration context and introduces a neighborhood-relative scoring mechanism with temporal score diffusion for stable class-conditional calibration. Experiments on four fraud benchmarks (YelpChi, S-FFSD, FTFD, and BankSim) show that ProtoCP achieves the target coverage with consistently smaller prediction sets than state-of-the-art baselines. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Picard1701ent/ProtoCP.git
Relational Deep Learning (RDL) models multi-tabular databases as temporal heterogeneous graphs to enable end-to-end representation learning. However, prevailing RDL evaluation practices rely on static, single-episode dataset snapshots, overlooking the continuous, time-evolving nature of real-world databases. Consequently, current RDL benchmarks fail to capture how model performance changes as new data accumulates over time. To address this limitation, we introduce an incremental, multi-episode evaluation and training paradigm to assess and improve the temporal robustness and adaptability of state-of-the-art RDL models. Using established large-scale datasets, we examine data evolution and model training dynamics, demonstrating that temporal concept drifts occur in the majority of predictive tasks. We present multiple incremental training regimes for fine-tuning the models and demonstrate that transfer learning is both feasible and highly effective in the RDL setting. Alongside a new temporal evaluation metric that prioritizes near-future accuracy, we show that our incrementally fine-tuned models consistently outperform the standard, expensive, from-scratch trained baselines.
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.
Nelson Aloysio Reis de Almeida Passos, Emanuele Carlini, Salvatore Tranics.LG cs.SI
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?
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.
Yixin Peng, Diego Collarana, Er Jin +1cs.LG cs.CL stat.ML
Temporal heterogeneous graphs offer a natural abstraction for dynamic relational systems in which diverse node and relation types co-exist and evolve over time. Learning on such graphs requires jointly modeling cross-type structural heterogeneity and the temporal dynamics of interactions, yet existing methods still struggle to reconcile parameter-efficient cross-type transfer with relation-aware specialization, and typically inject time only as additive features outside the attention kernel. We propose \textbf{THGFM}, a web-scale temporal heterogeneous graph fusion model that addresses both limitations within a unified dual-path architecture. THGFM couples a \textit{Shared-Space Temporal Attention} branch for parameter-efficient cross-type transfer with a \textit{Relational Type-Partitioned Temporal Attention} branch for relation-aware specialization, and integrates them through \textit{Dual-Path Relational--Shared Fusion}, instantiated with \textit{Type-Conditioned Non-Competitive Gated Sum Fusion}: a adaptive mechanism that assigns independent, type-conditioned feature-wise gates to the shared and specialized branches, allowing both to be amplified or suppressed without zero-sum competition. To directly incorporate relative time into the attention score, THGFM further introduces \textit{Rotary Temporal Attention}, which rotates queries and keys by half-phases of relative time before matching. THGFM consistently outperforms baseline graph transformer models on academic graphs benchmarks, delivering a $+3.25\%$ six-task mean gain, with peak relative gains of $+12.37\%$ on OAG-CS PV, $+4.87\%$ on PF-$L_2$, and $+1.18\%$ on PF-$L_1$, and $+4.24\%$, $+3.73\%$, and $+4.61\%$ on OGBN-MAG, HTAG-ArXiv, and HTAG-DBLP, respectively.
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 $-0.605$ ($R^2=0.9977$), 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 $6\%$ over a $50\times$ range of sampling budgets, while the floor sits $2.2\times$ to $34.3\times$ 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 $μ^2>v(1-2ρ)$. 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 $60\%$ of the error, the best observation-based corrector recovers $5.7\%$ of that, and extrapolation is strictly worse than doing nothing clever.
Mohammad Ostadmohammadi, Sepehr Kazemi, Hamid R. Rabieecs.SI cs.AI
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.
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.
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
Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have become increasingly popular in recent years due to their superior predictive performance by combining both spatial and temporal information. However, how these models utilize the information to make predictions is rather unexplored, leading to potentially faulty or biased models. This work introduces two novel model-agnostic explainers for local explanations of TGNNs based on Shapley and Owen values. The first method, an event-level (edge-level) Shapley explainer, applies the KernelSHAP algorithm to estimate contribution scores for individual temporal events, providing interpretable descriptions for model behavior. The second, a feature-level Shapley explainer, extends this framework by decomposing event-level Shapley values into Owen values, and thereby uncovers hierarchical dependencies of the event and its features. The explainers outperform SOTA explainers on different metrics and datasets. Additionally, the Feature Explainer reveals a faulty extraction of actual timestamps of a commonly used TGAT implementation, helping to further understand performance drops on very sparse explanations.