A temporal knowledge graph reasoning model based on recurrent encoding and contrastive learning

Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) are critical tools for capturing the dynamic nature of facts that evolve over time, making them highly valuable in a broad spectrum of intelligent applications. In the domain of temporal knowledge graph extrapolation reasoning, the prediction of future occurrences is of great significance and presents considerable obstacles. While current models consider the fact changes over time and recognize that historical facts may recur, they often overlook the influence of past events on future predictions. Motivated by these considerations, this work introduces a novel temporal knowledge graph reasoning model, named Temporal Reasoning with Recurrent Encoding and Contrastive Learning (TRCL), which integrates recurrent encoding and contrastive learning techniques. The proposed model has the ability to capture the evolution of historical facts, generating representations of entities and relationships through recurrent encoding. Additionally, TRCL incorporates a global historical matrix to account for repeated historical occurrences and employs contrastive learning to alleviate the interference of historical facts in predicting future events. The TKG reasoning outcomes are subsequently derived through a time decoder. A quantity of experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the exceptional performance of the proposed TRCL model across a range of metrics, surpassing state-of-the-art TKG reasoning models. When compared to the strong baseline Time-Guided Recurrent Graph Network (TiRGN) model, the proposed TRCL achieves 1.03% improvements on ICEWS14 using mean reciprocal rank (MRR) evaluation metric. This innovative proposed method not only enhances the accuracy of TKG extrapolation, but also sets a new standard for robustness in dynamic knowledge graph applications, paving the way for future research and practical applications in predictive intelligence systems.