@inproceedings{huang-etal-2026-regret,
    title = "Regret-Now: A Physics-Inspired Regret Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with {LLM}s",
    author = "Huang, Danyu  and
      Zhang, Yao  and
      Wang, Jun  and
      Yang, Zhenglu",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1208/",
    pages = "24133--24157",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Large Language Models have achieved impressive results in general reasoning tasks. However, they still face significant challenges when applied to temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA), particularly exhibiting broken temporal reasoning chains and a lack of dynamic error-correction. These limitations hinder their capacity to handle complex temporal logic and make it difficult to recover once a reasoning error occurs. To address this issue, we propose Regret-Now, a novel LLM-based temporal reasoning framework inspired by the physical principle of minimum potential energy. Regret-Now models the reasoning process as a dynamic trajectory moving toward a more stable state, where each step is expected to a lower potential energy. We introduce the Regret Stage that evaluates the ``potential energy'' of each intermediate reasoning step and triggers real-time rollback if an abnormal rise in potential energy is detected{---}indicating a likely error. We evaluate Regret-Now on two standard TKGQA benchmarks: CronQuestions and MultiTQ. Experimental results show consistent gains over strong baselines, validating physics-inspired modeling for LLM-based TKGQA. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-yii/Regret-Now."
}