# DTFormer: A Transformer-Based Method for Discrete-Time Dynamic Graph Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.18523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18523/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12454/) (2022)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [Temporal Graph Networks for Deep Learning on Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10637/) (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)
- [EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10191/) (2019)
- [Fundamentals of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03314/) (2018)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Structured Sequence Modeling with Graph Convolutional Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07659/) (2016)
- [Representation Learning for Dynamic Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11485/) (2019)
- [Gate-Variants of Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05923/) (2017)
- [Towards Better Dynamic Graph Learning: New Architecture and Unified Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13047/) (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)
- [Motifs in Temporal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.09259/) (2016)
- [Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03697/) (2018)
- [Discrete-time Temporal Network Embedding via Implicit Hierarchical Learning in Hyperbolic Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03767/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Graphormer on Large-Scale Molecular Modeling Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04810/) (2022)
- [TGL: A General Framework for Temporal GNN Training on Billion-Scale Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14883/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Rethinking Time Encoding via Learnable Transformation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00887/) (2025)
- [PromptDyG: Test-Time Prompt Adaptation on Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22914/) (2026)
- [DyGSSM: Multi-view Dynamic Graph Embeddings with State Space Model Gradient Update](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09017/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Discrete-Time Dynamic Graphs (DTDGs), which are prevalent in real-world implementations and notable for their ease of data acquisition, have garnered considerable attention from both academic researchers and industry practitioners. The representation learning of DTDGs has been extensively applied to model the dynamics of temporally changing entities and their evolving connections. Currently, DTDG representation learning predominantly relies on GNN+RNN architectures, which manifest the inherent limitations of both Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). GNNs suffer from the over-smoothing issue as the models architecture goes deeper, while RNNs struggle to capture long-term dependencies effectively. GNN+RNN architectures also grapple with scaling to large graph sizes and long sequences. Additionally, these methods often compute node representations separately and focus solely on individual node characteristics, thereby overlooking the behavior intersections between the two nodes whose link is being predicted, such as instances where the two nodes appear together in the same context or share common neighbors. This paper introduces a novel representation learning method DTFormer for DTDGs, pivoting from the traditional GNN+RNN framework to a Transformer-based architecture. Our approach exploits the attention mechanism to concurrently process topological information within the graph at each timestamp and temporal dynamics of graphs along the timestamps, circumventing the aforementioned fundamental weakness of both GNNs and RNNs. Moreover, we enhance the model's expressive capability by incorporating the intersection relationships among nodes and integrating a multi-patching module. Extensive experiments conducted on six public dynamic graph benchmark datasets confirm our model's efficacy, achieving the SOTA performance.