# Temporal Motif Signatures for Temporal Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01176 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01176/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02244/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Improving Graph Neural Network Expressivity via Subgraph Isomorphism Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09252/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Understanding and Extending Subgraph GNNs by Rethinking Their Symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11140/) (2022)
- [Higher-order organization of complex networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08447/) (2016)
- [Motifs in Temporal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.09259/) (2016)
- [MotifNet: a motif-based Graph Convolutional Network for directed graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01572/) (2018)
- [Graph Neural Networks for temporal graphs: State of the art, open challenges, and opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01018/) (2023)
- [Provably expressive temporal graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15059/) (2022)
- [TGB 2.0: A Benchmark for Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09639/) (2024)
- [TempME: Towards the Explainability of Temporal Graph Neural Networks via Motif Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19324/) (2023)
- [Improving Temporal Link Prediction via Temporal Walk Matrix Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04013/) (2024)
- [Representation Learning over Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04051/) (2018)
- [MotifExplainer: a Motif-based Graph Neural Network Explainer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00519/) (2022)
- [Motif Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14900/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Link Prediction in Temporal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21185/) (2025)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks via Motif-based Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08270/) (2018)
- [HyperEvent: A Strong Baseline for Dynamic Link Prediction via Relative Structural Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11836/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real temporal interaction streams carry predictive structure in short-horizon motif patterns -- repetition, reciprocity, star diversity, triadic flow -- that vanilla temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) often fail to expose to their edge scorers. We show this concretely on MOOC interaction prediction, where a small four-feature family of past-window star counts already delivers most of the lift over a strong static GNN. Across a wide set of real and synthetic temporal datasets we find that motif activity organizes consistently along three scale-stable axes (dyadic recency/reciprocity, star diversity, triadic flow), and we use this empirical structure to design a compact 13-coordinate, leakage-safe, candidate-local motif feature map h(u, v, t) that linearly embeds into any static or temporal encoder without architectural changes. A temporal Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) analysis places the augmentation relative to the first level of an anchored temporal-WL hierarchy and exhibits a candidate-anchored pair on which motif features distinguish. We demonstrate empirically that the same augmentation consistently lifts performance across heterogeneous tasks: TGB link-property prediction across all five baselines, edge classification on Bitcoin Alpha/OTC and MOOC, and graph-level classification of synthetic temporal generators.