ARNS: Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling with Curriculum Learning for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion

Inductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing links involving unseen entities, making it a particularly challenging task for knowledge representation learning. Traditional embedding-based methods often fall short in this setting due to their limited structural reasoning capabilities. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a promising alternative by explicitly modeling the graph topology. However, their performance heavily relies on the quality of negative samples during training, which significantly influences the learned representations and generalization ability. To tackle this issue, we propose Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling (ARNS), a negative sampling approach specifically tailored for GNN-based inductive KGC. It integrates three key strategies: (1) High-quality negatives via Linear WD for discriminative learning, (2) Relation-aware negatives utilizing relation graphs to preserve structural patterns, as well as (3) Adaptive curriculum learning that dynamically adjusts sampling ratios based on performance feedback. Our key innovation lies in a performance-driven adaptation mechanism that monitors training dynamics and modulates negative sample difficulty. This approach starts with easier samples for stability, and progressively introduces challenging negatives. Experiments demonstrate that ARNS outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant MRR improvements while maintaining training stability. The adaptive design is particularly beneficial in inductive scenarios, where models can infer structural patterns from limited observations.