Learning Continuous Temporal Dynamics on Symplectic Manifolds for Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding

Jiang Li, Zehua Duo, Tian Lan, Feilong Bao, Guanglai Gao, Xiangdong Su


Abstract
Temporal knowledge graph embedding (TKGE) aims to model the temporal evolution of relational facts. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on discrete timestamp lookup tables and high-dimensional embedding spaces, which lack explicit structural constraints for continuous-time dynamics. As a result, temporal patterns are often captured through capacity scaling rather than principled dynamic modeling, leading to limited parameter efficiency and scalability.To address these limitations, we propose , a physics-inspired framework that embeds temporal dynamics into a symplectic phase space. Our model introduces a structure-preserving Hamiltonian evolution mechanism based on a pairwise-decoupled Hamiltonian generator and its Cayley transform, ensuring that temporal transformations adhere to the symplectic group Sp(2d) and preserve phase-space volume with linear computational complexity. In addition, we design a Time-Aware Parameter Modulation mechanism that integrates continuous Rotary Time Embeddings via Feature-wise Linear Modulation, enabling smooth temporal evolution while capturing event-driven variations. Theoretical analysis establishes the geometric validity of the proposed framework. Extensive experiments on standard TKGE benchmarks demonstrate that achieves competitive performance with substantially lower embedding dimensions. Furthermore, empirical results show that the proposed continuous Hamiltonian evolution facilitates generalization to unseen timestamps by learning transferable temporal dynamics from the underlying geometric structure.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.804
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
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
16341–16357
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.804/
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Cite (ACL):
Jiang Li, Zehua Duo, Tian Lan, Feilong Bao, Guanglai Gao, and Xiangdong Su. 2026. Learning Continuous Temporal Dynamics on Symplectic Manifolds for Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 16341–16357, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Continuous Temporal Dynamics on Symplectic Manifolds for Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding (Li et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.804.pdf
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