Evolving graph attention networks for dynamic link prediction

Yucai Jiang, Rongying Shan, Gang Fu, Zhuolin Li, Jingjing Sun, Zhongyun Bao and Feifei Wei

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 6, 1-13

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn node representations via aggregating their neighbors, have shown superior performance and become the de facto efficient toolkit for analyzing and learning from data with structured properties. However, most existing GNNs are designed for static graphs and assume fixed graph structures and node sets. In many real-world applications, graphs evolve continuously over time—with nodes and edges appearing or disappearing—rendering static models insufficient for capturing these temporal dynamics. In this paper, we propose Evolving Graph Attention Networks (EGAT), a novel framework for dynamic graph representation learning. Specifically, EGAT leverages the anisotropic attention mechanism of Graph Attention Networks (GATs) to capture complex inter-node relationships. Crucially, the multi-head attention weights of the GAT are evolved over time via a recurrent neural network (RNN), enabling the model to adaptively adjust the importance of different neighbors as the graph topology and relational dynamics change. This weight-evolving paradigm couples the anisotropic attention mechanism of GATs with a recurrent subnetwork, enabling the joint modeling of topological evolution and temporal relational dynamics. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0349685

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0349685

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