---
title: "TILP — paper by Xiong et al. (2024) — summary and ideas"
description: "Temporal knowledge graphs (tKGs) attach validity intervals to facts, which makes link prediction… 29 references, cited by 14 papers here."
authors: ["Siheng Xiong", "Yuan Yang", "Faramarz Fekri", "James Clayton Kerce"]
year: 2024
venue: "arXiv:2402.12309"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12309"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.2402.12309"
arxiv: "2402.12309"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)"
licence_url: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/xiong-2024-tilp-differentiable-learning-temporal-logical/"
---
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# TILP: Differentiable Learning of Temporal Logical Rules on Knowledge Graphs

**Authors:** [Siheng Xiong](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/siheng-xiong/), [Yuan Yang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/yuan-yang/), [Faramarz Fekri](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/faramarz-fekri/) and James Clayton Kerce · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** arXiv:2402.12309 · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12309) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.12309) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2402.12309](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2402.12309) · [arXiv 2402.12309](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12309) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4391988329)

**Citations:** 11 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [14](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/xiong-2024-tilp-differentiable-learning-temporal-logical/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Temporal knowledge graphs (tKGs) attach validity intervals to facts, which makes link prediction harder than on static graphs. Embedding models are opaque and depend on absolute timestamps. Rule miners such as TLogic and StreamLearner score each rule separately by counting paths, so they miss interactions and similarities between rules and work with timestamps rather than intervals.

TILP is a differentiable framework that learns temporal logical rules. It uses constrained random walks that separate Markovian constraints (predicates, and relations to the query interval) from non-Markovian ones (pairwise relations between body intervals). Allen's 13 interval relations are reduced to three classes: before, touching and after. A separate module models temporal features such as recurrence, ordering, gaps between relation pairs and duration.

On WIKIDATA12k and YAGO11k, TILP matches or beats state-of-the-art baselines and explains each prediction with rules. Its advantage is larger when training data is scarce, imbalanced, or drawn from a different time period than the test data. This makes it attractive for interpretable reasoning over evolving facts.

## Key points
- **Benchmarks:** WIKIDATA12k and YAGO11k, both interval-based tKGs with yearly resolution.
  - They contain time-sensitive relations such as "member of sports team" and "playsFor".
- **Baselines:** HyTE, TA-ComplEx, TNTComplEx, DE-SimplE, TimePlex and TLogic.
- **Harder settings:**
  - *Reduced training sets:* repeated over 5 rounds.
  - *Biased data:* 50% of one relation's training edges removed.
  - *Time shift:* WIKIDATA12k splits by start year into train [0, 2008], validation [2008, 2012] and test [2012, 2018].
- **Why it generalizes:** rules rely on relative temporal relations and relation-specific attention, not on absolute timestamps or shared entity embeddings.
- **Cost:** with maximum rule length L=5 on a 4-CPU machine, rule search takes about 1741 s on WIKIDATA12k and 572 s on YAGO11k. Code is available at github.com/xiongsiheng/TILP.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Georgia Institute of Technology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/georgia-institute-of-technology/) — University, Atlanta, United States · 133 works · 24,497 citations

📚 Shelves (2): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 16,667 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 16,194 works

🧭 Topics (1): [🕸️ Knowledge graphs & ontologies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/knowledge-graphs/) · 192 works

## Cite

Cite as: Siheng Xiong, Yuan Yang, Faramarz Fekri and James Clayton Kerce. 2024. TILP: Differentiable Learning of Temporal Logical Rules on Knowledge Graphs. arXiv:2402.12309.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{xiong2024tilp,
  title = {{TILP: Differentiable Learning of Temporal Logical Rules on Knowledge Graphs}},
  author = {Siheng Xiong, Yuan Yang, Faramarz Fekri and James Clayton Kerce},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2402.12309},
  eprint = {2402.12309},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2402.12309}
}
```

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*Updated 30 October 2026*