English

StreamTGN: A GPU-Efficient Serving System for Streaming Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Databases 2026-03-24 v1

Abstract

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on dynamic graph tasks, yet existing systems focus exclusively on accelerating training -- at inference time, every new edge triggers O(V)O(|V|) embedding updates even though only a small fraction of nodes are affected. We present \textbf{StreamTGN}, the first streaming TGN inference system exploiting the inherent locality of temporal graph updates: in an LL-layer TGN, a new edge affects only nodes within LL hops of the endpoints, typically less than 0.2\% on million-node graphs. StreamTGN maintains persistent GPU-resident node memory and uses dirty-flag propagation to identify the affected set A\mathcal{A}, reducing per-batch complexity from O(V)O(|V|) to O(A)O(|\mathcal{A}|) with zero accuracy loss. Drift-aware adaptive rebuild scheduling and batched streaming with relaxed ordering further maximize throughput. Experiments on eight temporal graphs (2K--2.6M nodes) show 4.5×\times--739×\times speedup for TGN and up to 4,207×\times for TGAT, with identical accuracy. StreamTGN is orthogonal to training optimizations: combining SWIFT with StreamTGN yields 24×\times end-to-end speedup across three architectures (TGN, TGAT, DySAT).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.21090,
  title  = {StreamTGN: A GPU-Efficient Serving System for Streaming Temporal Graph Neural Networks},
  author = {Lingling Zhang and Pengpeng Qiao and Zhiwei Zhang and Ye Yuan and Guoren Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.21090},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:31:57.749Z