# A Transfer Framework for Enhancing Temporal Graph Learning in Data-Scarce Settings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00852/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [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)
- [GraphRNN: Generating Realistic Graphs with Deep Auto-regressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08773/) (2018)
- [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)
- [NetGAN: Generating Graphs via Random Walks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00816/) (2018)
- [Combinatorial Optimization with Physics-Inspired Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01188/) (2021)
- [Learning from Multiple Cities: A Meta-Learning Approach for Spatial-Temporal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08518/) (2019)
- [Pre-Training Graph Neural Networks for Cold-Start Users and Items Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07064/) (2020)
- [MAMO: Memory-Augmented Meta-Optimization for Cold-start Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03183/) (2020)
- [TIGGER: Scalable Generative Modelling for Temporal Interaction Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03564/) (2022)
- [Understanding Editing Behaviors in Multilingual Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07266/) (2015)
- [Predicting a Business Star in Yelp from Its Reviews Text Alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.0864/) (2014)
- [Robust Training of Temporal GNNs using Nearest Neighbours based Hard Negatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09239/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dynamic interactions between entities are prevalent in domains like social platforms, financial systems, healthcare, and e-commerce. These interactions can be effectively represented as time-evolving graphs, where predicting future connections is a key task in applications such as recommendation systems. Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have achieved strong results for such predictive tasks but typically require extensive training data, which is often limited in real-world scenarios. One approach to mitigating data scarcity is leveraging pre-trained models from related datasets. However, direct knowledge transfer between TGNNs is challenging due to their reliance on node-specific memory structures, making them inherently difficult to adapt across datasets. To address this, we introduce a novel transfer approach that disentangles node representations from their associated features through a structured bipartite encoding mechanism. This decoupling enables more effective transfer of memory components and other learned inductive patterns from one dataset to another. Empirical evaluations on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly enhances TGNN performance in low-data regimes, outperforming non-transfer baselines by up to 56% and surpassing existing transfer strategies by 36%
