The standard evaluation protocol for measuring the quality of Knowledge Graph Completion methods - the task of inferring new links to be added to a graph - typically involves a step which ranks every entity of a Knowledge Graph to assess their fit as a head or tail of a candidate link to be added. In Knowledge Graphs on a larger scale, this task rapidly becomes prohibitively heavy. Previous approaches mitigate this problem by using random sampling of entities to assess the quality of links predicted or suggested by a method. However, we show that this approach has serious limitations since the ranking metrics produced do not properly reflect true outcomes. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of these effects along with the following findings. First, we empirically find and theoretically motivate why sampling uniformly at random vastly overestimates the ranking performance of a method. We show that this can be attributed to the effect of easy versus hard negatives. Second, we propose a framework that uses relational recommenders to guide the selection of candidates for evaluation. We provide both theoretical and empirical justification of our methodology, and find that simple and fast methods work extremely well, matching advanced neural approaches. Even when a large portion of the true candidates for a property are missed, the estimation of the ranking metrics on a downstream model barely deteriorates. With our proposed framework, we can reduce the time and computation needed similar to random sampling strategies while vastly improving the estimation; on ogbl-wikikg2, we show that accurate estimations of the full ranking can be obtained in 20 seconds instead of 30 minutes. We conclude that considerable computational effort can be saved by effective preprocessing and sampling methods and still reliably predict performance accurately of the true performance for the entire ranking procedure. We make our code available to the community11Accessible at https://github.com/Filco306/are-we-wasting-time.

Transformer models have become the dominant backbone for sequence modeling, leveraging self-attention to produce contextualized token representations. These are typically aggregated into fixed-size vectors via pooling operations for downstream tasks. While much of the literature has focused on attention mechanisms, the role of pooling remains underexplored despite its critical impact on model behavior. In this paper, we introduce a theoretical framework that rigorously characterizes the expressivity of Transformer-based models equipped with widely used pooling methods by deriving closed-form bounds on their representational capacity and the ability to distinguish similar inputs. Our analysis extends to different variations of attention formulations, demonstrating that these bounds hold across diverse architectural variants. We empirically evaluate pooling strategies across tasks requiring both global and local contextual understanding, spanning three major modalities: computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. Results reveal consistent trends in how pooling choices affect accuracy, sensitivity, and optimization behavior. Our findings unify theoretical and empirical perspectives, providing practical guidance for selecting or designing pooling mechanisms suited to specific tasks. This work positions pooling as a key architectural component in Transformer models and lays the foundation for more principled model design beyond attention alone.

In this paper, we propose a novel way of representing graphs for processing in Graph Neural Networks. We reduce the dimensionality of the input data by using Random Indexing, a Vector Symbolic Architectural framework; we implement a new trainable neural layer, also inspired by Vector Symbolic Architectures; we leverage the sparseness of the incoming data in a Sparse Neural Network framework. Our experiments on a number of publicly available datasets and standard benchmarks demonstrate that we can reduce the number of parameters by up to two orders of magnitude. We show how this parsimonious approach not only delivers competitive results but even improves performance for node classification and link prediction. We find that this holds in particular for cases where the graph lacks node features.

In this paper, we report experiments on Few- and Zero-shot Knowledge Graph completion, where the objective is to add missing relational links between entities into an existing Knowledge Graph with few or no previous examples of the relation in question. While previous work has used pre-trained embeddings based on the structure of the graph as input for a neural network, nobody has, to the best of our knowledge, addressed the task by only using textual descriptive data associated with the entities and relations, much since current standard benchmark data sets lack such information. We therefore enrich the benchmark data sets for these tasks by collecting textual description data to provide a new resource for future research to bridge the gap between structural and textual Knowledge Graph completion. Our results show that we can improve the results for Knowledge Graph completion for both Few- and Zero-shot scenarios with up to a two-fold increase of all metrics in the Zero-shot setting. From a more general perspective, our experiments demonstrate the value of using textual resources to enrich more formal representations of human knowledge and in the utility of transfer learning from textual data and text collections to enrich and maintain knowledge resources.