Farimah Poursafaei

dblp:277/0215 · DBLP profile ↗
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11ranked-venue papers
3as first author
11since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0006-6785-3253ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 8 · 1 first-author · 8 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 4 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Temporal Graph Learning Workshop
abstract
The Temporal Graph Learning (TGL) workshop, now in its third edition at KDD 2025, offers an interdisciplinary platform for researchers to explore the evolving applications of temporal networks in various domains, including recommender systems, social network analysis, traffic analytics, and epidemiological data analysis.The workshop aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas across disciplines, highlight successes and challenges in TGL, and outline future research directions.The workshop welcomes diverse contributions, offers keynote talks from academic and industry experts, and is complemented by a panel discussion on emerging aspects of TGL.
Shenyang Huang, Daniele Zambon, Andrea Cini, Farimah Poursafaei, Jacob Chmura, Julia Gastinger, Reihaneh Rabbany, Michael M. Bronstein
KDD (2)4
2025 MiNT: Multi-Network Transfer Benchmark for Temporal Graph Learning
abstract
Temporal Graph Learning (TGL) aims to discover patterns in evolving networks or temporal graphs and leverage these patterns to predict future interactions. However, most existing research focuses on learning from a single network in isolation, leaving the challenges of within-domain and cross-domain generalization largely unaddressed. In this study, we introduce a new benchmark of 84 real-world temporal transaction networks and propose Temporal Multi-network Transfer (MiNT), a pre-training framework designed to capture transferable temporal dynamics across diverse networks. We train MiNT models on up to 64 transaction networks and evaluate their generalization ability on 20 held-out, unseen networks. Our results show that MiNT consistently outperforms individually trained models, revealing a strong relation between the number of pre-training networks and transfer performance. These findings highlight scaling trends in temporal graph learning and underscore the importance of network diversity in improving generalization. This work establishes the first large-scale benchmark for studying transferability in TGL and lays the groundwork for developing Temporal Graph Foundation Models. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/benjaminnNgo/ScalingTGNs}
Kiarash Shamsi, Tran Gia Bao Ngo, Razieh Shirzadkhani, Shenyang Huang, Farimah Poursafaei, Poupak Azad, Reihaneh Rabbany, Baris Coskunuzer, Guillaume Rabusseau, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora
NeurIPS5
2024 GraphPulse: Topological representations for temporal graph property prediction
abstract
Many real-world networks evolve over time, and predicting the evolution of such networks remains a challenging task. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown empirical success for learning on static graphs, but they lack the ability to effectively learn from nodes and edges with different timestamps. Consequently, the prediction of future properties in temporal graphs remains a relatively under-explored area. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing a principled framework, named GraphPulse. The framework combines two important techniques for the analysis of temporal graphs within a Newtonian framework. First, we employ the Mapper method, a key tool in topological data analysis, to extract essential clustering information from graph nodes. Next, we harness the sequential modeling capabilities of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for temporal reasoning regarding the graph's evolution. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our model enhances the ROC-AUC metric by 10.2\% in comparison to the top-performing state-of-the-art method across various temporal networks. We provide the implementation of GraphPulse at https://github.com/kiarashamsi/GraphPulse.
Kiarash Shamsi, Farimah Poursafaei, Shenyang Huang, Tran Gia Bao Ngo, Baris Coskunuzer, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora
ICLR2
2024 TGB 2.0: A Benchmark for Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Heterogeneous Graphs
abstract
Multi-relational temporal graphs are powerful tools for modeling real-world data, capturing the evolving and interconnected nature of entities over time. Recently, many novel models are proposed for ML on such graphs intensifying the need for robust evaluation and standardized benchmark datasets. However, the availability of such resources remains scarce and evaluation faces added complexity due to reproducibility issues in experimental protocols. To address these challenges, we introduce Temporal Graph Benchmark 2.0 (TGB 2.0), a novel benchmarking framework tailored for evaluating methods for predicting future links on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Temporal Heterogeneous Graphs with a focus on large-scale datasets, extending the Temporal Graph Benchmark. TGB 2.0 facilitates comprehensive evaluations by presenting eight novel datasets spanning five domains with up to 53 million edges. TGB 2.0 datasets are significantly largerthan existing datasets in terms of number of nodes, edges, or timestamps. In addition, TGB 2.0 provides a reproducible and realistic evaluation pipeline for multi-relational temporal graphs. Through extensive experimentation, we observe that 1) leveraging edge-type information is crucial to obtain high performance, 2) simple heuristic baselines are often competitive with more complex methods, 3) most methods fail to run on our largest datasets, highlighting the need for research on more scalable methods.
Julia Gastinger, Shenyang Huang, Michael Galkin, Erfan Loghmani, Ali Parviz, Farimah Poursafaei, Jacob Danovitch, Emanuele Rossi 0001, Ioannis Koutis, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Reihaneh Rabbany, Guillaume Rabusseau
NeurIPS6
2024 On the Scalability of GNNs for Molecular Graphs
abstract
Scaling deep learning models has been at the heart of recent revolutions in language modelling and image generation. Practitioners have observed a strong relationship between model size, dataset size, and performance. However, structure-based architectures such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are yet to show the benefits of scale mainly due to lower efficiency of sparse operations, large data requirements, and lack of clarity about the effectiveness of various architectures. We address this drawback of GNNs by studying their scaling behavior. Specifically, we analyze message-passing networks, graph Transformers, and hybrid architectures on the largest public collection of 2D molecular graphs for supervised pretraining. For the first time, we observe that GNNs benefit tremendously from the increasing scale of depth, width, number of molecules and associated labels. A major factor is the diversity of the pretraining data that comprises thousands of labels per molecule derived from bio-assays, quantum simulations, transcriptomics and phenomic imaging. We further demonstrate strong finetuning scaling behavior on 38 highly competitive downstream tasks, outclassing previous large models. This gives rise to MolGPS, a new graph foundation model that allows to navigate the chemical space, outperforming the previous state-of-the-arts on 26 out the 38 downstream tasks. We hope that our work paves the way for an era where foundational GNNs drive pharmaceutical drug discovery.
Maciej Sypetkowski, Frederik Wenkel, Farimah Poursafaei, Nia Dickson, Karush Suri, Philip Fradkin, Dominique Beaini
NeurIPS3
2024 Temporal Graph Analysis with TGX
abstract
Real-world networks, with their evolving relations, are best captured as temporal graphs. However, existing software libraries are largely designed for static graphs where the dynamic nature of temporal graphs is ignored. Bridging this gap, we introduce TGX, a Python package specially designed for analysis of temporal networks that encompasses an automated pipeline for data loading, data processing, and analysis of evolving graphs. TGX provides access to eleven built-in datasets and eight external Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB) datasets as well as any novel datasets in the .csv format. Beyond data loading, TGX facilitates data processing functionalities such as discretization of temporal graphs and node sub-sampling to accelerate working with larger datasets. For comprehensive investigation, TGX offers network analysis by providing a diverse set of measures, including average node degree and the evolving number of nodes and edges per timestamp. Additionally, the package consolidates meaningful visualization plots indicating the evolution of temporal patterns, such as Temporal Edge Appearance (TEA) and Temporal Edge Traffic (TET) plots. The TGX package is a robust tool for examining the features of temporal graphs and can be used in various areas like studying social networks, citation networks, and tracking user interactions. We plan to continuously support and update TGX based on community feedback. TGX is publicly available on: https://github.com/ComplexData-MILA/TGX.
Razieh Shirzadkhani, Shenyang Huang, Elahe Kooshafar, Reihaneh Rabbany, Farimah Poursafaei
WSDM5
2023 Towards Improved Illicit Node Detection with Positive-Unlabelled Learning
abstract
Detecting illicit nodes on blockchain networks is a valuable task for strengthening future regulation. Recent machine learning-based methods proposed to tackle the tasks are using some blockchain transaction datasets with a small portion of samples labeled positive and the rest unlabelled (PU). Albeit the assumption that a random sample of unlabeled nodes are normal nodes is used in some works, we discuss that the label mechanism assumption for the hidden positive labels, and its effect on the evaluation metrics is worth considering. We further explore that PU classifiers dealing with potential hidden positive labels can have improved performance compared to regular machine learning models. We test the PU classifiers with a list of graph representation learning methods for obtaining different feature distributions for the same data to have more reliable results.
Junliang Luo, Farimah Poursafaei, Xue (Steve) Liu
ICBC2
2023 Temporal Graph Benchmark for Machine Learning on Temporal Graphs
abstract
We present the Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB), a collection of challenging and diverse benchmark datasets for realistic, reproducible, and robust evaluation of machine learning models on temporal graphs. TGB datasets are of large scale, spanning years in duration, incorporate both node and edge-level prediction tasks and cover a diverse set of domains including social, trade, transaction, and transportation networks. For both tasks, we design evaluation protocols based on realistic use-cases. We extensively benchmark each dataset and find that the performance of common models can vary drastically across datasets. In addition, on dynamic node property prediction tasks, we show that simple methods often achieve superior performance compared to existing temporal graph models. We believe that these findings open up opportunities for future research on temporal graphs. Finally, TGB provides an automated machine learning pipeline for reproducible and accessible temporal graph research, including data loading, experiment setup and performance evaluation. TGB will be maintained and updated on a regular basis and welcomes community feedback. TGB datasets, data loaders, example codes, evaluation setup, and leaderboards are publicly available at https://tgb.complexdatalab.com/.
Shenyang Huang, Farimah Poursafaei, Jacob Danovitch, Matthias Fey, Weihua Hu, Emanuele Rossi 0001, Jure Leskovec, Michael M. Bronstein, Guillaume Rabusseau, Reihaneh Rabbany
NeurIPS2
2022 Towards Better Evaluation for Dynamic Link Prediction
abstract
Despite the prevalence of recent success in learning from static graphs, learning from time-evolving graphs remains an open challenge. In this work, we design new, more stringent evaluation procedures for link prediction specific to dynamic graphs, which reflect real-world considerations, to better compare the strengths and weaknesses of methods. First, we create two visualization techniques to understand the reoccurring patterns of edges over time and show that many edges reoccur at later time steps. Based on this observation, we propose a pure memorization-based baseline called EdgeBank. EdgeBank achieves surprisingly strong performance across multiple settings which highlights that the negative edges used in the current evaluation are easy. To sample more challenging negative edges, we introduce two novel negative sampling strategies that improve robustness and better match real-world applications. Lastly, we introduce six new dynamic graph datasets from a diverse set of domains missing from current benchmarks, providing new challenges and opportunities for future research. Our code repository is accessible at https://github.com/fpour/DGB.git.
Farimah Poursafaei, Shenyang Huang, Kellin Pelrine, Reihaneh Rabbany
NeurIPS1
2022 A Strong Node Classification Baseline for Temporal Graphs
abstract
Many real-world complex systems can be modelled by temporal networks. Representation learning on these networks often captures their dynamic evolution and is a first step for performing further analysis, e.g. node classification. Node classification is a fundamental task for graph analysis in general and in the context of temporal graph, is often employed to categories nodes based on their activity patterns. Analysis of existing real world networks from different high-stake domains reveals that the rate of the malicious activities is on uptick, resulting in catastrophic social or economic consequences. This strongly motivates designing accurate node classification methods for temporal graphs. In this paper, we propose TGbase, for node classification on weighted temporal networks. TGbase efficiently extracts key features to consider the structural characteristics of each node and its neighborhood as well as the intensity and timestamp of the interactions among node pairs. These features accurately differentiate different classes of nodes, as shown on eight real-world benchmark datasets, outperforming multiple state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep/complex models. Our strong yet simple model is also generic, whereas the SOTA contenders are designed often for their specific (class of) datasets.
Farimah Poursafaei, Zeljko Zilic, Reihaneh Rabbany
SDM1
2021 SigTran: Signature Vectors for Detecting Illicit Activities in Blockchain Transaction Networks
Farimah Poursafaei, Reihaneh Rabbany, Zeljko Zilic
PAKDD (1)1