# Temporal Graph Rewiring with Expander Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02362 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02362/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [On the Bottleneck of Graph Neural Networks and its Practical Implications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05205/) (2020)
- [Temporal Graph Networks for Deep Learning on Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10637/) (2020)
- [Understanding over-squashing and bottlenecks on graphs via curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14522/) (2021)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07962/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Improves Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05485/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning for Dynamic Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11485/) (2019)
- [Modeling polypharmacy side effects with graph convolutional networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00543/) (2018)
- [Inductive Representation Learning in Temporal Networks via Causal Anonymous Walks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05974/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Expander Graph Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02997/) (2022)
- [Neural Common Neighbor with Completion for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00890/) (2023)
- [How does over-squashing affect the power of GNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03589/) (2023)
- [Graph AI in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13767/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Cayley Graph Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03424/) (2024)
- [DyGMamba: Efficiently Modeling Long-Term Temporal Dependency on Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04713/) (2024)
- [TAMI: Taming Heterogeneity in Temporal Interactions for Temporal Graph Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23577/) (2025)
- [Expressivity of Representation Learning on Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs: An Information-Flow Centric Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03783/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evolving relations in real-world networks are often modelled by temporal graphs. Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) emerged to model evolutionary behaviour of such graphs by leveraging the message passing primitive at the core of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). It is well-known that GNNs are vulnerable to several issues directly related to the input graph topology, such as under-reaching and over-squashing - we argue that these issues can often get exacerbated in temporal graphs, particularly as the result of stale nodes and edges. While graph rewiring techniques have seen frequent usage in GNNs to make the graph topology more favourable for message passing, they have not seen any mainstream usage on TGNNs. In this work, we propose Temporal Graph Rewiring (TGR), the first approach for graph rewiring on temporal graphs, to the best of our knowledge. TGR constructs message passing highways between temporally distant nodes in a continuous-time dynamic graph by utilizing expander graph propagation, a prominent framework used for graph rewiring on static graphs which makes minimal assumptions on the underlying graph structure. On the challenging TGB benchmark, TGR achieves state-of-the-art results on tgbl-review, tgbl-coin, tgbl-comment and tgbl-flight datasets at the time of writing. For tgbl-review, TGR has 50.5% improvement in MRR over the base TGN model and 22.2% improvement over the base TNCN model. The significant improvement over base models demonstrates clear benefits of temporal graph rewiring.
