TIE: A Framework for Embedding-based Incremental Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

TL;DR

The paper introduces TIE, a framework for efficient incremental learning in temporal knowledge graphs that reduces training time significantly while maintaining performance, addressing challenges like catastrophic forgetting and fact change detection.

Contribution

TIE combines TKG representation learning, experience replay, and temporal regularization to enable efficient incremental updates in temporal knowledge graphs.

Findings

Reduces training time by about ten times.

Improves metrics related to model intransigence and fact change detection.

Maintains performance on traditional measures.

Abstract

Reasoning in a temporal knowledge graph (TKG) is a critical task for information retrieval and semantic search. It is particularly challenging when the TKG is updated frequently. The model has to adapt to changes in the TKG for efficient training and inference while preserving its performance on historical knowledge. Recent work approaches TKG completion (TKGC) by augmenting the encoder-decoder framework with a time-aware encoding function. However, naively fine-tuning the model at every time step using these methods does not address the problems of 1) catastrophic forgetting, 2) the model's inability to identify the change of facts (e.g., the change of the political affiliation and end of a marriage), and 3) the lack of training efficiency. To address these challenges, we present the Time-aware Incremental Embedding (TIE) framework, which combines TKG representation learning, experience replay, and temporal regularization. We introduce a set of metrics that characterizes the intransigence of the model and propose a constraint that associates the deleted facts with negative labels. Experimental results on Wikidata12k and YAGO11k datasets demonstrate that the proposed TIE framework reduces training time by about ten times and improves on the proposed metrics compared to vanilla full-batch training. It comes without a significant loss in performance for any traditional measures. Extensive ablation studies reveal performance trade-offs among different evaluation metrics, which is essential for decision-making around real-world TKG applications.