KGE Calibrator: An Efficient Probability Calibration Method of Knowledge Graph Embedding Models for Trustworthy Link Prediction

Yang Yang, Mohan Timilsina, Edward Curry


Abstract
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models are designed for the task of link prediction, which aims to infer missing triples by learning representations for entities and relations. While KGE models excel at ranking-based link prediction, the critical issue of probability calibration has been largely overlooked, resulting in uncalibrated estimates that limit their adoption in high-stakes domains where trustworthy predictions are essential. Addressing this is challenging, as we demonstrate that existing calibration methods are ill-suited to KGEs, often significantly degrading the essential ranking performance they are meant to support. To overcome this, we introduce the KGE Calibrator (KGEC), the first probability calibration method tailored for KGE models to enhance the trustworthiness of their predictions. KGEC integrates three key techniques: a Jump Selection Strategy that improves efficiency by selecting the most informative instances while filtering out less significant ones; Multi-Binning Scaling, which models different confidence levels separately to increase capacity and flexibility; and a Wasserstein distance-based calibration loss that further boosts calibration performance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that KGEC consistently outperforms existing calibration methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency, making it a promising solution for calibration in KGE models.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1522
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29952–29975
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.emnlp-main.1522/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1522
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Yang, Mohan Timilsina, and Edward Curry. 2025. KGE Calibrator: An Efficient Probability Calibration Method of Knowledge Graph Embedding Models for Trustworthy Link Prediction. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 29952–29975, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KGE Calibrator: An Efficient Probability Calibration Method of Knowledge Graph Embedding Models for Trustworthy Link Prediction (Yang et al., EMNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.emnlp-main.1522.pdf
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