LANTERN in the Event Stream: Training-Free Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting by Balancing Inertia and Shifts
Chengyuan Jin, Ao Chang, Daojian Zeng, Wenhao Teng, Xiangwen Liao, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Yubo Chen
Abstract
Temporal knowledge graph forecasting(TKGF) asks a model to rank the mostplausible future entity for a query such as(s, r, ?, t) from historical events. Recenttraining-free methods use large languagemodels (LLMs) for this task, but their accuracydepends heavily on which past events areshown in the prompt under a tight contextbudget. We present LANTERN, a training-freeprompting framework that addresses thisbottleneck by combining two complementaryviews of history: a long-window strengthscore for stable interaction patterns anda short-window novelty score for suddenchanges. LANTERN first filters unhelpfulevents, then selects a compact evidence setwith Pareto-greedy selection, and finally addsone structure-aware analogical demonstration.Across ICEWS14, ICEWS05-15, ICEWS18,and GDELT, LANTERN consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art training-free baselineAnRe under the same backbone and 2-hopcandidate protocol, improving Hits@1 by upto 2.5 points and MRR by up to 1.2 points.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.findings-acl.559
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 11519–11533
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.559/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Chengyuan Jin, Ao Chang, Daojian Zeng, Wenhao Teng, Xiangwen Liao, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, and Yubo Chen. 2026. LANTERN in the Event Stream: Training-Free Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting by Balancing Inertia and Shifts. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 11519–11533, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- LANTERN in the Event Stream: Training-Free Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting by Balancing Inertia and Shifts (Jin et al., Findings 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.559.pdf