# Time-aware Graph Structure Learning via Sequence Prediction on Temporal Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07699 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07699/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Temporal Graph Networks for Deep Learning on Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10637/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07962/) (2020)
- [Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01207/) (2019)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10191/) (2019)
- [Graph Structure Learning for Robust Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10203/) (2020)
- [Iterative Deep Graph Learning for Graph Neural Networks: Better and Robust Node Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13009/) (2020)
- [Stochastic Beams and Where to Find Them: The Gumbel-Top-k Trick for Sampling Sequences Without Replacement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06059/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Graph Augmentation to Improve Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05819/) (2021)
- [Inductive Representation Learning in Temporal Networks via Causal Anonymous Walks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05974/) (2021)
- [Graph Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12811/) (2020)
- [Towards Better Dynamic Graph Learning: New Architecture and Unified Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13047/) (2023)
- [Do We Really Need Complicated Model Architectures For Temporal Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11636/) (2023)
- [ROLAND: Graph Learning Framework for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07239/) (2022)
- [Foundations and modelling of dynamic networks using Dynamic Graph Neural Networks: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07496/) (2020)
- [Towards Better Evaluation for Dynamic Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10128/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [DSLR: Diversity Enhancement and Structure Learning for Rehearsal-based Graph Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13711/) (2024)
- [DG-Mamba: Robust and Efficient Dynamic Graph Structure Learning with Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08160/) (2024)
- [LasTGL: An Industrial Framework for Large-Scale Temporal Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16605/) (2023)
- [Graffin: Stand for Tails in Imbalanced Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05339/) (2024)
- [Discovering Spatial Correlations of Earth Observations for weather forecasting by using Graph Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07659/) (2025)
- [Graph Structure Learning with Temporal Graph Information Bottleneck for Inductive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14859/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Temporal Graph Learning, which aims to model the time-evolving nature of graphs, has gained increasing attention and achieved remarkable performance recently. However, in reality, graph structures are often incomplete and noisy, which hinders temporal graph networks (TGNs) from learning informative representations. Graph contrastive learning uses data augmentation to generate plausible variations of existing data and learn robust representations. However, rule-based augmentation approaches may be suboptimal as they lack learnability and fail to leverage rich information from downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose a Time-aware Graph Structure Learning (TGSL) approach via sequence prediction on temporal graphs, which learns better graph structures for downstream tasks through adding potential temporal edges. In particular, it predicts time-aware context embedding based on previously observed interactions and uses the Gumble-Top-K to select the closest candidate edges to this context embedding. Additionally, several candidate sampling strategies are proposed to ensure both efficiency and diversity. Furthermore, we jointly learn the graph structure and TGNs in an end-to-end manner and perform inference on the refined graph. Extensive experiments on temporal link prediction benchmarks demonstrate that TGSL yields significant gains for the popular TGNs such as TGAT and GraphMixer, and it outperforms other contrastive learning methods on temporal graphs. We release the code at https://github.com/ViktorAxelsen/TGSL.