Full-History Graphs with Edge-Type Decoupled Networks for Temporal Reasoning
This work addresses temporal reasoning in dynamic graphs for applications such as autonomous driving and financial fraud detection, representing an incremental improvement over existing snapshot-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling evolving interactions among entities in tasks like driver-intention prediction and Bitcoin fraud detection by introducing a full-history graph with separate edge sets for structural and temporal relations, resulting in improved joint accuracy to 75.6% on Waymo and F1 score to 88.1% on Elliptic++.
Modeling evolving interactions among entities is critical in many real-world tasks. For example, predicting driver maneuvers in traffic requires tracking how neighboring vehicles accelerate, brake, and change lanes relative to one another over consecutive frames. Likewise, detecting financial fraud hinges on following the flow of funds through successive transactions as they propagate through the network. Unlike classic time-series forecasting, these settings demand reasoning over who interacts with whom and when, calling for a temporal-graph representation that makes both the relations and their evolution explicit. Existing temporal-graph methods typically use snapshot graphs to encode temporal evolution. We introduce a full-history graph that instantiates one node for every entity at every time step and separates two edge sets: (i) intra-time-step edges that capture relations within a single frame and (ii) inter-time-step edges that connect an entity to itself at consecutive steps. To learn on this graph we design an Edge-Type Decoupled Network (ETDNet) with parallel modules: a graph-attention module aggregates information along intra-time-step edges, a multi-head temporal-attention module attends over an entity's inter-time-step history, and a fusion module combines the two messages after every layer. Evaluated on driver-intention prediction (Waymo) and Bitcoin fraud detection (Elliptic++), ETDNet consistently surpasses strong baselines, lifting Waymo joint accuracy to 75.6\% (vs. 74.1\%) and raising Elliptic++ illicit-class F1 to 88.1\% (vs. 60.4\%). These gains demonstrate the benefit of representing structural and temporal relations as distinct edges in a single graph.