Papers › BoxE: A Box Embedding Model for Knowledge Base Completion

BoxE: A Box Embedding Model for Knowledge Base Completion

13 Jul 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2007.06267archive 2025-07-28

Ralph Abboud, İsmail İlkan Ceylan, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Tommaso Salvatori

Knowledge base completion (KBC) aims to automatically infer missing facts by exploiting information already present in a knowledge base (KB). A promising approach for KBC is to embed knowledge into latent spaces and make predictions from learned embeddings. However, existing embedding models are subject to at least one of the following limitations: (1) theoretical inexpressivity, (2) lack of support for prominent inference patterns (e.g., hierarchies), (3) lack of support for KBC over higher-arity relations, and (4) lack of support for incorporating logical rules. Here, we propose a spatio-translational embedding model, called BoxE, that simultaneously addresses all these limitations. BoxE embeds entities as points, and relations as a set of hyper-rectangles (or boxes), which spatially characterize basic logical properties. This seemingly simple abstraction yields a fully expressive model offering a natural encoding for many desired logical properties. BoxE can both capture and inject rules from rich classes of rule languages, going well beyond individual inference patterns. By design, BoxE naturally applies to higher-arity KBs. We conduct a detailed experimental analysis, and show that BoxE achieves state-of-the-art performance, both on benchmark knowledge graphs and on more general KBs, and we empirically show the power of integrating logical rules.

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Tasks

Knowledge Base CompletionKnowledge GraphsLink Prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Link Prediction FB-AUTO BoxE Hits@1 0.814 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction FB-AUTO BoxE Hits@10 0.898 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction FB-AUTO BoxE MRR 0.844 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction FB15k-237 BoxE Hits@1 0.238 #44 of 75 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction FB15k-237 BoxE Hits@10 0.538 #44 of 75 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction FB15k-237 BoxE MRR 0.337 #44 of 75 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction JF17K BoxE Hit@1 0.472 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction JF17K BoxE Hit@10 0.722 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction JF17K BoxE MRR 0.560 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction YAGO3-10 BoxE Hits@1 0.494 #6 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction YAGO3-10 BoxE Hits@10 0.699 #6 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Link Prediction YAGO3-10 BoxE MRR 0.567 #6 of 18 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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