English

Continuous Time Quantum Walk Propagation for Irregular Temporal Graph Forecasting

Quantum Physics 2026-07-19 v1

Abstract

Continuous time quantum walks built on graph Laplacians produce non monotonic graph propagation features through quantum interference during evolution, which classical diffusion cannot achieve. Such walks deliver a physically motivated propagation scheme for temporal graph signal modeling. We propose Quantum Walk Temporal Architecture (QWTA), which replaces classical graph propagation with a CTQW-type parameterized spectral propagator. QWTA embeds effective observation intervals into the spectral phase modulation of the propagation kernel. QWTA-Base preserves exact CTQW spectral evolution and serves as a physically faithful propagation reference. QWTA-GR further introduces phase soft clipping and gated residual fusion to stabilize propagation. The results show that explicit phase encoding of irregular time intervals, when combined with suitable stabilization, provides a physically motivated and competitive graph propagation design for temporal graph forecasting with missing historical observations.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.17273,
  title  = {Continuous Time Quantum Walk Propagation for Irregular Temporal Graph Forecasting},
  author = {Jiaqi Sun and Tianhao Li and Zhihao Bian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.17273},
  year   = {2026}
}