Making temporal clustering scalable, GPU-accelerated primitives suggest a route toward theory-grounded pooling, while raising a central question: when does community-based coarse-graining preserve the dynamics needed for downstream learning tasks?
Abstract
This work focuses on the problem of learning on temporal graphs, with particular emphasis on the task of clustering: obtaining coarse-grained representations by aggregating information from nodes, edges, and temporal dynamics - a task related to pooling in machine learning on graphs, or community detection in network science. Although graph neural networks reach state-of-the-art performance across many downstream graph tasks, their advantage over established descriptive and inferential clustering algorithms is far less settled, especially under demands of efficiency and recovery accuracy. We frame this tension through three linked perspectives: principles, connecting graph learning and community detection through shared spectral foundations and detectability thresholds in stochastic block model regimes; primitives, making spectral clustering and multislice modularity optimization tractable through GPU-accelerated temporal backends; and pooling, viewing principled community detection as a theory-grounded coarse-graining operator for temporal graphs. Our results indicate that algorithmic methods remain the appropriate tool where attributes are absent or weak - scalability rather than accuracy being the binding obstacle - while neural models are most compelling when structural, temporal, and attribute signals align. By making temporal clustering scalable, GPU-accelerated primitives suggest a route toward theory-grounded pooling, while raising a central question: when does community-based coarse-graining preserve the dynamics needed for downstream learning tasks?
An Efficient Multi-Attention Graph Network (EMAGN) that linearises the spatial attention mechanism itself, inspired by the theory of fast high-dimensional Gaussian filtering, which surpasses Linformer and Performer in both accuracy and efficiency within the same backbone, owing to its traffic-network-aware adaptive clustering.
Mingxing Xu, Rakesh Chowdary Machineni, Ke Liu et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
This work uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to solve Inductive Correlation Clustering, a novel generalization of the CC problem designed to handle unseen graph instances, and indicates that the method serves as an efficient pooling layer, enhancing the ability of GNNs to capture hierarchical structural information in networks.
Francesco Paolo Nerini, Francesco Bonchi, Arijit Khan et al.· 0 citations
Learning graph structures from data is a fundamental problem that spans a wide range of signal processing and machine learning tasks. While significant effort has been made to tackle the problem, existing research has largely evolved along two parallel directions. The first seeks to infer the topology of an individual graph from observations supported on it, whereas the second seeks to learn a generative distribution from observed graph instances, enabling the sampling of new graphs. This review presents a unified framework that connects these formulations by viewing them as inverse problems of a common generation process for graph data. We review the major methodologies within this framework, highlight their relationships, strengths, and limitations, and identify opportunities for integrating ideas across paradigms. By bridging graph topology learning and graph generation, this review provides a broader cross-disciplinary perspective on the field and outlines promising directions for future research.
Xiaowen Dong, Hoi-To Wai, Si-Heng Chen et al.· 0 citations
Dynamic community detection on temporal graphs seeks to identify evolving community structures while allowing node memberships to change over time. In this work, we formulate dynamic community detection over observed node-time instances, where each node-time instance in the temporal interaction stream is assigned a cluster label. We propose a diffusion-guided contrastive learning framework that uses a local temporal diffusion affinity matrix to construct positive and negative node-time pairs and organise the learned representations according to their temporal structural relationships. We then apply a clustering algorithm to the resulting embedding space to detect dynamic communities. Experiments on synthetic temporal networks show that the proposed method outperforms static community detection baselines and achieves competitive or better performance than existing dynamic community detection methods in terms of AMI and ARI, while maintaining good scalability. We further apply the method to a large-scale OpenAlex computer science collaboration network from 2016 to 2025, revealing persistent and evolving collaboration communities in real scientific data. These results suggest that time-node-level representation learning provides an effective framework for scalable dynamic community detection on temporal graphs.
Pei-Jie Zhong, Raúl Mondragón, Richard Clegg· 0 citations
This work addresses community detection in temporal networks through GPU-accelerated extensions of spectral clustering and modularity-based algorithms originally designed for static graphs. Built on the NVIDIA RAPIDS ecosystem, the framework enables the characterization and tracking of communities in snapshot-based dynamic graphs, either by Leiden greedy optimization with multi-GPU support via Dask-based workload distribution, or eigendecomposition of a symmetric Bethe-Hessian operator. Our multislice modularity backend achieves up to roughly three orders of magnitude speedup over the CPU reference under an equal-work budget, depending on graph density and snapshot count, while preserving compatibility with existing graph analytics pipelines. We demonstrate its applicability on real-world and synthetic datasets, facilitating exploratory analysis of structural network properties over time. Such capabilities are relevant across several application domains, such as epidemic spreading, financial systems, cybersecurity, and trajectory and mobility analysis. We release our implementation as free and open-source software, including Python bindings through the NetworkX-Temporal library for ease of use and zero-code acceleration with existing codebases.
N. A. Passos, Emanuele Carlini, Salvatore Trani· 1 citation
CoRe-GNN is proposed, which performs both propagations in parallel at each layer: a coarsened inter-cluster term capturing long-range structure, and a local intra-cluster term preserving per-node discriminability.
Antonin Joly, Nicolas Keriven, Aline Roumy· 0 citations
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