# SCoR: A Hierarchical Framework for Forecasting Relations Between Scientific Concepts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22174/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [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)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [Entire Space Multi-Task Model: An Effective Approach for Estimating Post-Click Conversion Rate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07931/) (2018)
- [Know-Evolve: Deep Temporal Reasoning for Dynamic Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05742/) (2017)
- [Do We Really Need Complicated Model Architectures For Temporal Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11636/) (2023)
- [SciREX: A Challenge Dataset for Document-Level Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00512/) (2020)
- [Learning from History: Modeling Temporal Knowledge Graphs with Sequential Copy-Generation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08492/) (2020)
- [Relational Message Passing for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06757/) (2020)
- [AGATHA: Automatic Graph-mining And Transformer based Hypothesis generation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05635/) (2020)
- [SciER: An Entity and Relation Extraction Dataset for Datasets, Methods, and Tasks in Scientific Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21155/) (2024)
- [History repeats Itself: A Baseline for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16726/) (2024)
- [Predicting New Research Directions in Materials Science using Large Language Models and Concept Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16824/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anticipating emerging research directions is a critical goal of AI-assisted science. Existing methods mainly predict which concepts will co-occur in future papers, but co-occurrence captures shared attention rather than the scientific meaning of a connection, such as whether one method uses, combines, replaces, or contradicts another. We formulate research-direction discovery as hierarchical scientific-relation forecasting over a shared candidate-pair space, comprising three temporally aligned tasks: first co-occurrence, first scientific-relation formation, and relation type at formation. We construct SCoR-Graph from 187,848 cs.CV papers published between 2017 and 2026, yielding 270,687 consolidated concepts, 7.45 million co-occurrence edges, and 615,036 typed, directed relation edges. From cutoff-specific graph snapshots, we derive SCoR-Bench, a leakage-audited benchmark for these three capabilities, with expert-verified gold labels for the entire relation-type test set. We further introduce HiSCoR, a task-adapted model family that models relation emergence as a temporally evolving, hierarchically constrained process by encoding pre-cutoff event histories and conditioning relation formation on future co-occurrence. On the held-out 2025-2026 window, HiSCoR achieves an AUROC of 0.9515, a 2.4% relative improvement over the strongest temporal-graph baseline, and improves population-AUPRC by 14.0%; its relation-type variant achieves a Macro-AUROC of 0.7795. Ablations show that semantic, co-occurrence, and typed-relation views provide complementary predictive evidence. SCoR advances research-direction forecasting from predicting which concepts will co-occur to anticipating whether and how evidence-backed scientific relations will emerge.