Cost Characterization of Vertically Partitioned Federated Knowledge Graphs

2026-09-11

AI Summary

研究了垂直划分联邦知识图谱的成本问题，通过比较四种策略并使用五个指标评估，为跨组织推理和负载均衡提供实用指导。

Abstract

Knowledge graphs are increasingly distributed across autonomous organizations that share an entity space but own disjoint subsets of relations, forming a vertical partition. Answering a multi-hop query may require combining facts from several silos, making the partitioning strategy a key data management decision that affects communication, indexing, load balance, and query latency. However, the costs associated with different partitioning strategies remain insufficiently studied. We formalize vertical partitioning as a design space and compare four strategies: semantic domain grouping, frequency-balanced partitioning, co-occurrence graph-cut partitioning, and random partitioning. We evaluate them using five metrics: communication cost, candidate index size, cross-silo path length, load balance, and end-to-end query latency. Three of the five prove to be determined by the graph and the silo count rather than by the partition, which reduces the design problem to two conflicting axes, cross-silo path length and load balance. Experiments on MetaQA and PathQuestion use a fixed federated knowledge graph question-answering architecture based on TransE embeddings and a frozen BERT encoder across three silo configurations. By keeping the learning model unchanged, we isolate the effect of partitioning and show that the trade-off between locality and balance holds only where each silo can hold several relations, weakening as the number of silos increases. The study provides practical guidance for deployments constrained by cross-silo reasoning or by silo load.

Problem

• Vertically Partitioned Federated Knowledge Graphs
• Multi-hop Query
• Communication Cost
• Load Balance
• Query Latency

Innovation

• vertical partitioning
• knowledge graphs
• cross-silo path length
• load balance
• federated learning