ChronoSpike: An Adaptive Spiking Graph Neural Network for Dynamic Graphs

Abstract

Dynamic graph representation learning requires capturing both structural relationships and temporal evolution, yet existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: attention-based methods achieve expressiveness at $O(T^2)$ complexity, while recurrent architectures suffer from gradient pathologies and dense state storage. Spiking neural networks offer event-driven efficiency but remain limited by sequential propagation, binary information loss, and local aggregation that misses global context. We propose ChronoSpike, an adaptive spiking graph neural network that integrates learnable LIF neurons with per-channel membrane dynamics, multi-head attentive spatial aggregation on continuous features, and a lightweight Transformer temporal encoder, enabling both fine-grained local modeling and long-range dependency capture with linear memory complexity $O(T \cdot d)$. On three large-scale benchmarks, ChronoSpike outperforms twelve state-of-the-art baselines by $2.0\%$ Macro-F1 and $2.4\%$ Micro-F1 while achieving $3-10\times$ faster training than recurrent methods with a constant 105K-parameter budget independent of graph size. We provide theoretical guarantees for membrane potential boundedness, gradient flow stability under contraction factor $ρ< 1$, and BIBO stability; interpretability analyses reveal heterogeneous temporal receptive fields and a learned primacy effect with $83-88\%$ sparsity.