What Do Temporal Graph Learning Models Learn?

Abstract

Learning on temporal graphs has become a central topic in graph representation learning, with numerous benchmarks indicating the strong performance of state-of-the-art models. However, recent work has raised concerns about the reliability of benchmark results, noting issues with commonly used evaluation protocols and the surprising competitiveness of simple heuristics. This contrast raises the question of which properties of the underlying graphs temporal graph learning models actually use to form their predictions. We address this by systematically evaluating seven models on their ability to capture eight fundamental attributes related to the link structure of temporal graphs. These include structural characteristics such as density, temporal patterns such as recency, and edge formation mechanisms such as homophily. Using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we analyze how well models learn these attributes. Our findings reveal a mixed picture: models capture some attributes well but fail to reproduce others. With this, we expose important limitations. Overall, we believe that our results provide practical insights for the application of temporal graph learning models, and motivate more interpretability-driven evaluations in temporal graph learning research.