Edge-Gradient Augmentation under Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Graph

Temporal link prediction is critical for understand- ing dynamic interactions in evolving networks, informing appli- cations ranging from social network analysis to recommendation systems. Existing methods typically rely on raw temporal graph data, often neglecting explicit edge-change information that can significantly improve predictive performance. To address this gap, we propose edge-gradient reinforced learning (EG-RL), a framework that explicitly encodes edge-gradient events (edge births and deaths) through dedicated node and link encoding modules. EG-RL uses a policy-driven reinforcement-learning mechanism to dynamically select and augment the most infor- mative edge snapshots, guided by critic-based feedback to opti- mize prediction accuracy. The model comprises distinct modules for node encoding, link encoding, token mixing, and channel mixing, integrated through global pooling and followed by a two-layer multilayer perceptron classifier. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamic graph datasets demonstrate substantial gains in area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and average precision. Ablation studies further confirm the necessity of adaptive edge-gradient augmentation and validate the effectiveness of the proposed encoding and reinforcement- learning mechanisms.