# TGB-Seq Benchmark: Challenging Temporal GNNs with Complex Sequential Dynamics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02975 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02975/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Representation Learning for Dynamic Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11485/) (2019)
- [Inductive Relation Prediction by Subgraph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06962/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Temporal Graph Benchmark for Machine Learning on Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01026/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning Tree-based Deep Model for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02294/) (2018)
- [APAN: Asynchronous Propagation Attention Network for Real-time Temporal Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11545/) (2020)
- [TCL: Transformer-based Dynamic Graph Modelling via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07944/) (2021)
- [RepeatNet: A Repeat Aware Neural Recommendation Machine for Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02646/) (2018)
- [TREND: TempoRal Event and Node Dynamics for Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14303/) (2022)
- [Joint Optimization of Tree-based Index and Deep Model for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07565/) (2019)
- [TGB 2.0: A Benchmark for Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09639/) (2024)
- [UCTopic: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Phrase Representations and Topic Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13469/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Link Prediction Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04094/) (2015)
- [Personalized Showcases: Generating Multi-Modal Explanations for Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00422/) (2022)
- [Learning Optimal Tree Models Under Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15408/) (2020)
- [A survey of dynamic graph neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18211/) (2024)
- [On the Feasibility of Simple Transformer for Dynamic Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14009/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Future Link Prediction Without Memory or Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19408/) (2025)
- [What Do Temporal Graph Learning Models Learn?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09416/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models as Predictors in Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03258/) (2025)
- [Are We Really Measuring Progress? Transferring Insights from Evaluating Recommender Systems to Temporal Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12588/) (2025)
- [GDGB: A Benchmark for Generative Dynamic Text-Attributed Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03267/) (2025)
- [T-GRAB: A Synthetic Diagnostic Benchmark for Learning on Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10183/) (2025)
- [Integrating Sequential and Relational Modeling for User Events: Datasets and Prediction Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11903/) (2025)
- [Sequence Diffusion Model for Temporal Link Prediction in Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23233/) (2026)
- [ChronoSpike: An Adaptive Spiking Graph Neural Network for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01124/) (2026)
- [Where Does Neural Advantage Arise in Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph Prediction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06765/) (2026)
- [Model Metamers Reveal Invariances in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17378/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Divide: End-to-End Sequence-Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25126/) (2025)
- [ST-TGExplainer: Disentangling Stability and Transition Patterns for Temporal GNN Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19822/) (2026)
- [Estimation-Prediction Tradeoff in Causal Probabilistic Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28225/) (2026)
- [Do Temporal Link Predictors Need Learned Memory? A Smoothed-Count Baseline with a Handful of Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35364/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Future link prediction is a fundamental challenge in various real-world dynamic systems. To address this, numerous temporal graph neural networks (temporal GNNs) and benchmark datasets have been developed. However, these datasets often feature excessive repeated edges and lack complex sequential dynamics, a key characteristic inherent in many real-world applications such as recommender systems and ``Who-To-Follow'' on social networks. This oversight has led existing methods to inadvertently downplay the importance of learning sequential dynamics, focusing primarily on predicting repeated edges. In this study, we demonstrate that existing methods, such as GraphMixer and DyGFormer, are inherently incapable of learning simple sequential dynamics, such as ``a user who has followed OpenAI and Anthropic is more likely to follow AI at Meta next.'' Motivated by this issue, we introduce the Temporal Graph Benchmark with Sequential Dynamics (TGB-Seq), a new benchmark carefully curated to minimize repeated edges, challenging models to learn sequential dynamics and generalize to unseen edges. TGB-Seq comprises large real-world datasets spanning diverse domains, including e-commerce interactions, movie ratings, business reviews, social networks, citation networks and web link networks. Benchmarking experiments reveal that current methods usually suffer significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs on TGB-Seq, posing new challenges and opportunities for future research. TGB-Seq datasets, leaderboards, and example codes are available at https://tgb-seq.github.io/.