# BLADE: Distilled LLM Regularization for Calibrated Knowledge Graph Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29487 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29487/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge distillation for LLMs, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 16 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Knowledge distillation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/distill/knowledge-distillation-for-llms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [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)
- [KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06136/) (2019)
- [KG-BERT: BERT for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03193/) (2019)
- [Neural Bellman-Ford Networks: A General Graph Neural Network Framework for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06935/) (2021)
- [DeepPath: A Reinforcement Learning Method for Knowledge Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06690/) (2017)
- [CoDEx: A Comprehensive Knowledge Graph Completion Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07810/) (2020)
- [Bayesian Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Connection Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04064/) (2020)
- [TransG : A Generative Mixture Model for Knowledge Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.05488/) (2015)
- [Enhancing Text-based Knowledge Graph Completion with Zero-Shot Large Language Models: A Focus on Semantic Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08279/) (2023)
- [Beyond Completion: A Foundation Model for General Knowledge Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21926/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge graph completion models optimize ranking, although many downstream applications require calibrated probabilities. We present BLADE, a variational model that separates latent truth from graph recording and distills offline language-model judgments into a frozen teacher regularizer. The LLM is absent during inference. Posterior samples provide predictive probabilities and epistemic uncertainty, while the compact teacher remains available only as an optional triage factor. Across five benchmarks, BLADE remains competitive under a common ranking protocol and reduces adaptive ECE by a macro-average of 60.1% relative to deep ensembles and 78.1% relative to temperature-scaled RotatE. On identical FB15k-237 candidate sets, BLADE also improves ECE, Brier score, and NLL over validation-selected histogram binning and a matched generative ComplEx2 model, with these improvements persisting on a prespecified near-miss pool. Under controlled injected missingness, the full triage score achieves a mean AUC-PR of 0.863, compared with 0.805 for its strongest non-teacher variant. Leakage stress tests show that aligned semantics matter, but they cannot exclude knowledge acquired during LLM pretraining. We therefore claim calibration only for the declared candidate distributions, not for all unobserved triples.