DTGB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs

TL;DR

The paper introduces DTGB, a large-scale benchmark dataset for dynamic text-attributed graphs, enabling evaluation of models that understand evolving graph structures and associated natural language descriptions.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive benchmark for DyTAGs, including datasets, evaluation procedures, and extensive experiments with existing models and LLMs.

Findings

Existing models struggle with DyTAGs.

DTGB reveals limitations in current dynamic graph algorithms.

Incorporating text attributes enhances understanding of graph evolution.

Abstract

Dynamic text-attributed graphs (DyTAGs) are prevalent in various real-world scenarios, where each node and edge are associated with text descriptions, and both the graph structure and text descriptions evolve over time. Despite their broad applicability, there is a notable scarcity of benchmark datasets tailored to DyTAGs, which hinders the potential advancement in many research fields. To address this gap, we introduce Dynamic Text-attributed Graph Benchmark (DTGB), a collection of large-scale, time-evolving graphs from diverse domains, with nodes and edges enriched by dynamically changing text attributes and categories. To facilitate the use of DTGB, we design standardized evaluation procedures based on four real-world use cases: future link prediction, destination node retrieval, edge classification, and textual relation generation. These tasks require models to understand both dynamic graph structures and natural language, highlighting the unique challenges posed by DyTAGs. Moreover, we conduct extensive benchmark experiments on DTGB, evaluating 7 popular dynamic graph learning algorithms and their variants of adapting to text attributes with LLM embeddings, along with 6 powerful large language models (LLMs). Our results show the limitations of existing models in handling DyTAGs. Our analysis also demonstrates the utility of DTGB in investigating the incorporation of structural and textual dynamics. The proposed DTGB fosters research on DyTAGs and their broad applications. It offers a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating and advancing models to handle the interplay between dynamic graph structures and natural language. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/zjs123/DTGB.