Chengyuan Jin
2026
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
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Chengyuan Jin | Ao Chang | Daojian Zeng | Wenhao Teng | Xiangwen Liao | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao | Yubo Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
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.