NumCoKE: Ordinal-Aware Numerical Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs with Mixture-of-Experts and Contrastive Learning

TL;DR

NumCoKE introduces a novel framework for numerical reasoning over knowledge graphs, effectively integrating symbolic and numeric data while capturing fine-grained ordinal relationships through contrastive learning.

Contribution

It proposes a Mixture-of-Experts encoder for unified semantic embedding and an ordinal contrastive learning method to distinguish subtle numeric differences.

Findings

Outperforms baselines on three public KG benchmarks

Effectively captures ordinal relationships in numerical attributes

Improves semantic integration of entities, relations, and numeric data

Abstract

Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as a vital backbone for a wide range of AI applications, including natural language understanding and recommendation. A promising yet underexplored direction is numerical reasoning over KGs, which involves inferring new facts by leveraging not only symbolic triples but also numerical attribute values (e.g., length, weight). However, existing methods fall short in two key aspects: (1) Incomplete semantic integration: Most models struggle to jointly encode entities, relations, and numerical attributes in a unified representation space, limiting their ability to extract relation-aware semantics from numeric information. (2) Ordinal indistinguishability: Due to subtle differences between close values and sampling imbalance, models often fail to capture fine-grained ordinal relationships (e.g., longer, heavier), especially in the presence of hard negatives. To address these challenges, we propose NumCoKE, a numerical reasoning framework for KGs based on Mixture-of-Experts and Ordinal Contrastive Embedding. To overcome (C1), we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts Knowledge-Aware (MoEKA) encoder that jointly aligns symbolic and numeric components into a shared semantic space, while dynamically routing attribute features to relation-specific experts. To handle (C2), we propose Ordinal Knowledge Contrastive Learning (OKCL), which constructs ordinal-aware positive and negative samples using prior knowledge, enabling the model to better discriminate subtle semantic shifts. Extensive experiments on three public KG benchmarks demonstrate that NumCoKE consistently outperforms competitive baselines across diverse attribute distributions, validating its superiority in both semantic integration and ordinal reasoning.