Kernelized Edge Attention: Addressing Semantic Attention Blurring in Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) aim to capture the evolving structure and timing of interactions in dynamic graphs. Although many models incorporate time through encodings or architectural design, they often compute attention over entangled node and edge representations, failing to reflect their distinct temporal behaviors. Node embeddings evolve slowly as they aggregate long-term structural context, while edge features reflect transient, timestamped interactions (e.g. messages, trades, or transactions). This mismatch results in semantic attention blurring, where attention weights cannot distinguish between slowly drifting node states and rapidly changing, information-rich edge interactions. As a result, models struggle to capture fine-grained temporal dependencies and provide limited transparency into how temporal relevance is computed. This paper introduces KEAT (Kernelized Edge Attention for Temporal Graphs), a novel attention formulation that modulates edge features using a family of continuous-time kernels, including Laplacian, RBF, and learnable MLP variant. KEAT preserves the distinct roles of nodes and edges, and integrates seamlessly with both Transformer-style (e.g., DyGFormer) and message-passing (e.g., TGN) architectures. It achieves up to 18% MRR improvement over the recent DyGFormer and 7% over TGN on link prediction tasks, enabling more accurate, interpretable and temporally aware message passing in TGNNs.

A Scalable Approach to Covariate and Concept Drift Management via Adaptive Data Segmentation

In many real-world applications, continuous machine learning (ML) systems are crucial but prone to data drift, a phenomenon where discrepancies between historical training data and future test data lead to significant performance degradation and operational inefficiencies. Traditional drift adaptation methods typically update models using ensemble techniques, often discarding drifted historical data, and focus primarily on either covariate drift or concept drift. These methods face issues such as high resource demands, inability to manage all types of drifts effectively, and neglecting the valuable context that historical data can provide. We contend that explicitly incorporating drifted data into the model training process significantly enhances model accuracy and robustness. This paper introduces an advanced framework that integrates the strengths of data-centric approaches with adaptive management of both covariate and concept drift in a scalable and efficient manner. Our framework employs sophisticated data segmentation techniques to identify optimal data batches that accurately reflect test data patterns. These data batches are then utilized for training on test data, ensuring that the models remain relevant and accurate over time. By leveraging the advantages of both data segmentation and scalable drift management, our solution ensures robust model accuracy and operational efficiency in large-scale ML deployments. It also minimizes resource consumption and computational overhead by selecting and utilizing relevant data subsets, leading to significant cost savings. Experimental results on classification task on real-world and synthetic datasets show our approach improves model accuracy while reducing operational costs and latency. This practical solution overcomes inefficiencies in current methods, providing a robust, adaptable, and scalable approach.