TimeGraphs: Graph-based Temporal Reasoning
Paridhi Maheshwari Hongyu Ren Yanan Wang Rok Sosic Jure Leskovec
Many real-world systems exhibit temporal, dynamic behaviors, which are
captured as time series of complex agent interactions. To perform temporal
reasoning, current methods primarily encode temporal dynamics through simple
sequence-based models. However, in general these models fail to efficiently
capture the full spectrum of rich dynamics in the input, since the dynamics is
not uniformly distributed. In particular, relevant information might be harder
to extract and computing power is wasted for processing all individual
timesteps, even if they contain no significant changes or no new information.
Here we propose TimeGraphs, a novel approach that characterizes dynamic
interactions as a hierarchical temporal graph, diverging from traditional
sequential representations. Our approach models the interactions using a
compact graph-based representation, enabling adaptive reasoning across diverse
time scales. Adopting a self-supervised method, TimeGraphs constructs a
multi-level event hierarchy from a temporal input, which is then used to
efficiently reason about the unevenly distributed dynamics. This construction
process is scalable and incremental to accommodate streaming data. We evaluate
TimeGraphs on multiple datasets with complex, dynamic agent interactions,
including a football simulator, the Resistance game, and the MOMA human
activity dataset. The results demonstrate both robustness and efficiency of
TimeGraphs on a range of temporal reasoning tasks. Our approach obtains
state-of-the-art performance and leads to a performance increase of up to 12.2%
on event prediction and recognition tasks over current approaches. Our
experiments further demonstrate a wide array of capabilities including
zero-shot generalization, robustness in case of data sparsity, and adaptability
to streaming data flow.