# Entity Alignment with Reliable Path Reasoning and Relation-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08806 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08806/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [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)
- [A Benchmarking Study of Embedding-based Entity Alignment for Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07743/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Relational Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05811/) (2019)
- [Multi-view Knowledge Graph Embedding for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02390/) (2019)
- [Exploring and Evaluating Attributes, Values, and Structures for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03249/) (2020)
- [Co-training Embeddings of Knowledge Graphs and Entity Descriptions for Cross-lingual Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06478/) (2018)
- [Visual Pivoting for (Unsupervised) Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13603/) (2020)
- [Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06575/) (2019)
- [Neighborhood Matching Network for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05607/) (2020)
- [RAGA: Relation-aware Graph Attention Networks for Global Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00791/) (2021)
- [OntoEA: Ontology-guided Entity Alignment via Joint Knowledge Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07688/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [MEAformer: Multi-modal Entity Alignment Transformer for Meta Modality Hybrid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14454/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Uncertainly Missing and Ambiguous Visual Modality in Multi-Modal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16210/) (2023)
- [Gradformer: Graph Transformer with Exponential Decay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15729/) (2024)
- [NALA: an Effective and Interpretable Entity Alignment Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11968/) (2024)
- [TransAlign: Fully Automatic and Effective Entity Alignment for Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08540/) (2022)
- [Graph Fourier Transformer with Structure-Frequency Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19740/) (2025)
- [PSQE: A Theoretical-Practical Approach to Pseudo Seed Quality Enhancement for Unsupervised Multimodal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22903/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Entity Alignment (EA) has attracted widespread attention in both academia and industry, which aims to seek entities with same meanings from different Knowledge Graphs (KGs). There are substantial multi-step relation paths between entities in KGs, indicating the semantic relations of entities. However, existing methods rarely consider path information because not all natural paths facilitate for EA judgment. In this paper, we propose a more effective entity alignment framework, RPR-RHGT, which integrates relation and path structure information, as well as the heterogeneous information in KGs. Impressively, an initial reliable path reasoning algorithm is developed to generate the paths favorable for EA task from the relation structures of KGs, which is the first algorithm in the literature to successfully use unrestricted path information. In addition, to efficiently capture heterogeneous features in entity neighborhoods, a relation-aware heterogeneous graph transformer is designed to model the relation and path structures of KGs. Extensive experiments on three well-known datasets show RPR-RHGT significantly outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods, exceeding the best performing baseline up to 8.62% on Hits@1. We also show its better performance than the baselines on different ratios of training set, and harder datasets.