PEARL: Path-Entity Aligned Relational Learning with Contextual Subgraphs for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion

arXiv:2609.02216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inductive knowledge graph completion (IKGC) aims to predict missing links involving entities unseen during training, requiring models to learn transferable relational and structural patterns.

Existing subgraph- and path-based approaches often encode relational paths independently of their surrounding query subgraphs, although the predictive relevance of a path may vary across structural contexts. We propose PEARL, a Path-Entity Aligned Relational Learning framework that models paths as context-conditioned reasoning signals.

PEARL constructs a query-specific contextual subgraph from the union of the query entities' neighborhoods and uses a large language model (LLM)-guided retriever to distill semantically relevant paths. It then builds a bipartite interaction graph over paths, contextual entities, and a global subgraph representation, allowing path embeddings to adapt to local and global structural evidence.

To suppress noise introduced by the enlarged context, PEARL employs a dual-view contrastive objective that promotes representation consistency under stochastic contextual perturbations. Experiments on WN18RR, FB15k-237, and NELL-995 show that PEARL obtains the best average Hits@10 among the compared IKGC methods on all three benchmarks.

Ablation studies, efficiency analyses, and case studies further validate the contributions of contextual subgraph modeling, semantic path retrieval, path-entity interaction, and contrastive regularization.