StreamTab: Training-Free Temporal Link Prediction with Tabular Foundation Models

Mingqi Yang, Renqi Wu

Temporal link prediction uses past interactions to predict whether two nodes will interact in the future. Temporal graph neural networks achieve strong results on this task, but they are trained separately for each graph. How a model should use interaction history also depends on the candidates it is compared with. A past interaction can distinguish a recurring link from a random pair that has never interacted, but when the negative candidates have also interacted before, other signals are needed. We propose StreamTab, a training-free framework built on a frozen tabular foundation model pretrained only on synthetic tables. StreamTab describes each candidate pair by statistics of its past interactions and shows the model recent observed interactions and sampled negative pairs as labeled examples, from which the model scores new candidates. Its central design, regime conditioning, samples the negative examples according to how the candidates are sampled, so the examples show the distinction the model must make. As new interactions arrive, StreamTab updates the statistics and refreshes the examples while the model parameters stay fixed. On thirteen datasets against 21 temporal graph…