# Variational Knowledge Graph Reasoning

## TL;DR

This paper introduces extsc{Diva}, a variational inference framework for knowledge graph reasoning that models latent paths connecting entities to improve link prediction accuracy.

## Contribution

The paper proposes a novel variational inference approach with a unified architecture for KG reasoning, handling noise and complex scenarios more effectively.

## Key findings

- Achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets.
- Effectively models latent paths for relation prediction.
- Handles noise and complex reasoning scenarios.

## Abstract

Inferring missing links in knowledge graphs (KG) has attracted a lot of attention from the research community. In this paper, we tackle a practical query answering task involving predicting the relation of a given entity pair. We frame this prediction problem as an inference problem in a probabilistic graphical model and aim at resolving it from a variational inference perspective. In order to model the relation between the query entity pair, we assume that there exists an underlying latent variable (paths connecting two nodes) in the KG, which carries the equivalent semantics of their relations. However, due to the intractability of connections in large KGs, we propose to use variation inference to maximize the evidence lower bound. More specifically, our framework (\textsc{Diva}) is composed of three modules, i.e. a posterior approximator, a prior (path finder), and a likelihood (path reasoner). By using variational inference, we are able to incorporate them closely into a unified architecture and jointly optimize them to perform KG reasoning. With active interactions among these sub-modules, \textsc{Diva} is better at handling noise and coping with more complex reasoning scenarios. In order to evaluate our method, we conduct the experiment of the link prediction task on multiple datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performances on both datasets.