# Are Negative Samples Necessary in Entity Alignment? An Approach with High Performance, Scalability and Robustness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.05278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [FastGCN: Fast Learning with Graph Convolutional Networks via Importance Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10247/) (2018)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [Word Translation Without Parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04087/) (2017)
- [Graph Matching Networks for Learning the Similarity of Graph Structured Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12787/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Cross-lingual Knowledge Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03954/) (2016)
- [Cross-lingual Entity Alignment via Joint Attribute-Preserving Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05045/) (2017)
- [Relation-Aware Entity Alignment for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08210/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Graph Alignment Network with Gated Multi-hop Neighborhood Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08936/) (2019)
- [Unifying Knowledge Graph Learning and Recommendation: Towards a Better Understanding of User Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06236/) (2019)
- [Multi-Channel Graph Neural Network for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09898/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Matching Consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09621/) (2020)
- [Learning to Exploit Long-term Relational Dependencies in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04914/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Feature Learning for Knowledge Graph Enhanced Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08907/) (2019)
- [Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Matching Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11605/) (2019)
- [Relational Reflection Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07962/) (2020)
- [Learning with Average Top-k Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08826/) (2017)
- [Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06575/) (2019)
- [TransEdge: Translating Relation-contextualized Embeddings for Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13579/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Two Heads Are Better Than One: Integrating Knowledge from Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16960/) (2024)
- [Interactive Contrastive Learning for Self-supervised Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06225/) (2022)
- [Joint Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08922/) (2022)
- [Guiding Neural Entity Alignment with Compatibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15833/) (2022)
- [Dependency-aware Self-training for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16101/) (2022)
- [Aligning Multiple Knowledge Graphs in a Single Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00662/) (2024)
- [Resilience in Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21163/) (2024)
- [Understanding and Guiding Weakly Supervised Entity Alignment with Potential Isomorphism Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03025/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Entity Alignment Based on Personalized Discriminative Rooted Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10044/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Entity alignment (EA) aims to find the equivalent entities in different KGs, which is a crucial step in integrating multiple KGs. However, most existing EA methods have poor scalability and are unable to cope with large-scale datasets. We summarize three issues leading to such high time-space complexity in existing EA methods: (1) Inefficient graph encoders, (2) Dilemma of negative sampling, and (3) "Catastrophic forgetting" in semi-supervised learning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel EA method with three new components to enable high Performance, high Scalability, and high Robustness (PSR): (1) Simplified graph encoder with relational graph sampling, (2) Symmetric negative-free alignment loss, and (3) Incremental semi-supervised learning. Furthermore, we conduct detailed experiments on several public datasets to examine the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The experimental results show that PSR not only surpasses the previous SOTA in performance but also has impressive scalability and robustness.