Revisting Node Affinity Prediction In Temporal Graphs

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission3619 Authors

Keywords: Node affinity, Temporal graph networks, dynamic graphs, graph neural netowrks

TL;DR: This paper revisits node affinity prediction on temporal graphs and explains why simple heuristics often beat modern TGNNs.

Abstract:

Node affinity prediction is a common task that is widely used in temporal graph learning with applications in social and financial networks, recommender systems, and more. Recent works have addressed this task by adapting state-of-the-art dynamic link property prediction models to node affinity prediction. However, simple heuristics, such as persistent forecast or moving average, outperform these models.
In this work, we analyze the challenges in training current Temporal Graph Neural Networks for node affinity prediction and suggest appropriate solutions. Combining the solutions, we develop NAVIS - Node Affinity prediction model using VIrtual State, by exploiting the equivalence between heuristics and state space models. While promising, training NAVIS is non-trivial. Therefore, we further introduce a novel loss function for node affinity prediction. We evaluate NAVIS on TGB and show that it outperforms the state of the art, including heuristics.

Primary Area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies

Submission Number: 3619