Few-shot Relational Reasoning via Connection Subgraph Pretraining

Few-shot knowledge graph (KG) completion task aims to perform inductive reasoning over the KG: given only a few support triplets of a new relation bowtie (e.g., (chop,bowtie,kitchen), (read,bowtie,library), the goal is to predict the query triplets of the same unseen relation bowtie, e.g., (sleep,bowtie,?). Current approaches cast the problem in a meta-learning framework, where the model needs to be first jointly trained over many training few-shot tasks, each being defined by its own relation, so that learning/prediction on the target few-shot task can be effective. However, in real-world KGs, curating many training tasks is a challenging ad hoc process. Here we propose Connection Subgraph Reasoner (CSR), which can make predictions for the target few-shot task directly without the need for pre-training on the human curated set of training tasks. The key to CSR is that we explicitly model a shared connection subgraph between support and query triplets, as inspired by the principle of eliminative induction. To adapt to specific KG, we design a corresponding self-supervised pretraining scheme with the objective of reconstructing automatically sampled connection subgraphs. Our pretrained model can then be directly applied to target few-shot tasks on without the need for training few-shot tasks. Extensive experiments on real KGs, including NELL, FB15K-237, and ConceptNet, demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework: we show that even a learning-free implementation of CSR can already perform competitively to existing methods on target few-shot tasks; with pretraining, CSR can achieve significant gains of up to 52% on the more challenging inductive few-shot tasks where the entities are also unseen during (pre)training.