CLGNN: A Contrastive Learning-based GNN for Temporal Betweenness Prediction under Extreme Value Imbalance

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Zhengyi Yang

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Abstract

Temporal Betweenness Centrality (TBC) measures how often a node appears on optimal temporal paths, reflecting its importance in temporal networks. However, exact computation is highly expensive, and real-world TBC distributions are extremely imbalanced, causing learning-based models to overfit to zero-centrality nodes and fail to identify truly central nodes. Existing graph neural networks (GNNs) either ignore temporal dependencies or cannot handle such extreme imbalance. To address these issues, we propose CLGNN, a scalable and inductive contrastive learning-based GNN for accurate TBC prediction. CLGNN preserves temporal path validity through an instance graph and encodes structural, path-time aware dependencies via dual aggregation. To mitigate imbalance, a stability-based clustering-guided contrastive module separates nodes of different centrality levels in representation space, while a regression head estimates TBC values. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that CLGNN is scalable, generalizable, and effective.

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@inproceedings{zhang2026CLGNN,
  title = {CLGNN: A Contrastive Learning-based GNN for Temporal Betweenness Prediction under Extreme Value Imbalance},
  author = {Zhang, Tianming and Zhang, Renbo and Yang, Zhengyi and Gao, Yunjun and Cao, Bin and Fan, Jing},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3774904.3792709},
  doi = {10.1145/3774904.3792709},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026},
  publisher = {ACM},
  year = {2026},
  month = Apr,
  pages = {1505-1516}
}