CacheDyG: Decoupling Temporal Propagation for Efficient Dynamic Graph Learning

Abstract

Dynamic graphs are widely used to model time-evolving relational systems in real-world applications. Dynamic graph neural networks provide an effective framework for capturing both structural dependencies and temporal dynamics in such data. However, they typically intertwine temporal graph propagation with every optimization epoch and often maintain large trainable representations for each node-time pair. This design repeatedly recomputes largely unchanged historical structures, leading to substantial training and parameter overhead. To address this critical issue, we propose CacheDyG, a Cache-refine framework for efficient Dynamic Graph learning. Specifically, it decouples temporal propagation from routine parameter updates by constructing a time-ordered temporal dependency cache that stores graph-aware node-time representations in non-trainable buffers. During standard training epochs, CacheDyG reads from the cache and updates only a lightweight cache refiner, an adaptive residual gate, and the link predictor. Selective cache refresh further keeps cached representations aligned with the supervised objective while avoiding epoch-wise sparse propagation. Experiments on five dynamic graph benchmarks show that CacheDyG adopts substantially fewer trainable parameters and lower runtime to obtain more competitive predictive performance than baselines. These results demonstrate that cache-based decoupling provides an effective principle for scalable dynamic graph learning.