# HELEA: Hard-Negative Benchmark and LLM-based Reranking for Robust Entity Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28308 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28308/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02320/) (2020)
- [Multilingual Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Cross-lingual Knowledge Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03954/) (2016)
- [Cross-lingual Entity Alignment via Joint Attribute-Preserving Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05045/) (2017)
- [A Benchmarking Study of Embedding-based Entity Alignment for Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07743/) (2020)
- [Relation-Aware Entity Alignment for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08210/) (2019)
- [Learning to Exploit Long-term Relational Dependencies in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04914/) (2019)
- [Exploring and Evaluating Attributes, Values, and Structures for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03249/) (2020)
- [Relational Reflection Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07962/) (2020)
- [SelfKG: Self-Supervised Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01044/) (2022)
- [Knowing the No-match: Entity Alignment with Dangling Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02248/) (2021)
- [Unlocking the Power of Large Language Models for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15048/) (2024)
- [Toward Practical Entity Alignment Method Design: Insights from New Highly Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03468/) (2023)
- [Unifying Dual-Space Embedding for Entity Alignment via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05028/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Entity Alignment (EA) is essential for knowledge graph (KG) fusion, but existing benchmarks often allow models to exploit name overlap rather than relational structure. This makes it difficult to evaluate whether models can reject same-name entities that refer to different real-world objects. Our primary contribution is a same-name hard-negative augmentation strategy that simultaneously yields quality-controlled evaluation benchmarks (DW-HN29K, DY-HN27K) and augmented training corpora (DW-Train, DY-Train), by mining same-name but distinct entity pairs from KG name-collision groups. We further introduce HELEA, a two-stage framework integrating (i) entity encoder retrieval trained on hard-negative-augmented training corpora with 1-hop KG context, and (ii) LLM-based reranking without additional training. Experiments show that name-dependent baselines collapse to near-random performance on our hard-negative benchmarks, while HELEA achieves F1 0.967 on DW-HN29K while maintaining Hit@1 0.993 on standard DW-15K.