English

Fast-and-Frugal Text-Graph Transformers are Effective Link Predictors

Computation and Language 2025-06-17 v4

Abstract

We propose Fast-and-Frugal Text-Graph (FnF-TG) Transformers, a Transformer-based framework that unifies textual and structural information for inductive link prediction in text-attributed knowledge graphs. We demonstrate that, by effectively encoding ego-graphs (1-hop neighbourhoods), we can reduce the reliance on resource-intensive textual encoders. This makes the model both fast at training and inference time, as well as frugal in terms of cost. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on three popular datasets and show that FnF-TG can achieve superior performance compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. We also extend inductive learning to a fully inductive setting, where relations don't rely on transductive (fixed) representations, as in previous work, but are a function of their textual description. Additionally, we introduce new variants of existing datasets, specifically designed to test the performance of models on unseen relations at inference time, thus offering a new test-bench for fully inductive link prediction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.06778,
  title  = {Fast-and-Frugal Text-Graph Transformers are Effective Link Predictors},
  author = {Andrei C. Coman and Christos Theodoropoulos and Marie-Francine Moens and James Henderson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.06778},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACL 2025 Findings

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:11:33.757Z