# RelBall: Relation Ball with Quaternion Rotation for Knowledge Graph Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27967 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27967/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [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)
- [Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10281/) (2019)
- [Learning Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09419/) (2019)
- [Multi-relational Poincar'e Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09791/) (2019)
- [BoxE: A Box Embedding Model for Knowledge Base Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06267/) (2020)
- [QuatRE: Relation-Aware Quaternions for Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12517/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world knowledge graphs are often incomplete, lacking many valid facts. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims to predict missing links using known triples, thereby enhancing graph coverage. A key challenge is modeling diverse relational patterns such as symmetry, antisymmetry, inversion, composition and semantic hierarchy. Existing models such as RotatE can capture symmetric, antisymmetric, inverse, and commutative composition patterns, yet struggle with non-commutative composition. Rotate3D addresses this by introducing non-commutativity via three-dimensional rotations, but still fails to capture the semantic hierarchies prevalent in knowledge graphs. Moreover, both models cannot effectively model one-to-many relations. To overcome these limitations, we propose RelBall, which extends Rotate3D with two innovations. First, our model introduces modulus transformation to model hierarchies, driving abstract concepts toward smaller moduli and concrete instances toward larger ones. Second, it introduces a tail-centric relation ball to model one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relations. RelBall offers the following advantages: (1) coverage of all relational patterns, including the ones mentioned above; (2) an interpretable hierarchical representation where the modulus directly reflect semantic levels; (3) support for one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relations. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate RelBall's competitive link prediction performance against various baselines.