# Is Architectural Complexity Overrated? Competitive and Interpretable Knowledge Graph Completion with RelatE

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18971 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18971/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Embedding Entities and Relations for Learning and Inference in Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6575/) (2014)
- [Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06357/) (2016)
- [RotatE: Knowledge Graph Embedding by Relational Rotation in Complex Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10197/) (2019)
- [Convolutional 2D Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01476/) (2017)
- [TuckER: Tensor Factorization for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09590/) (2019)
- [SimplE Embedding for Link Prediction in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04868/) (2018)
- [Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10281/) (2019)
- [Query2box: Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs in Vector Space using Box Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05969/) (2020)
- [Learning Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09419/) (2019)
- [Learning Attention-based Embeddings for Relation Prediction in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01195/) (2019)
- [BoxE: A Box Embedding Model for Knowledge Base Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06267/) (2020)
- [On the representation and embedding of knowledge bases beyond binary relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.08642/) (2016)
- [Generalizing Tensor Decomposition for N-ary Relational Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03988/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We revisit the efficacy of simple, real-valued embedding models for knowledge graph completion and introduce RelatE, an interpretable and modular method that efficiently integrates dual representations for entities and relations. RelatE employs a real-valued phase-modulus decomposition, leveraging sinusoidal phase alignments to encode relational patterns such as symmetry, inversion, and composition. In contrast to recent approaches based on complex-valued embeddings or deep neural architectures, RelatE preserves architectural simplicity while achieving competitive or superior performance on standard benchmarks. Empirically, RelatE outperforms prior methods across several datasets: on YAGO3-10, it achieves an MRR of 0.521 and Hit@10 of 0.680, surpassing all baselines. Additionally, RelatE offers significant efficiency gains, reducing training time by 24%, inference latency by 31%, and peak GPU memory usage by 22% compared to RotatE. Perturbation studies demonstrate improved robustness, with MRR degradation reduced by up to 61% relative to TransE and by up to 19% compared to RotatE under structural edits such as edge removals and relation swaps. Formal analysis further establishes the model's full expressiveness and its capacity to represent essential first-order logical inference patterns. These results position RelatE as a scalable and interpretable alternative to more complex architectures for knowledge graph completion.