Graph Attention Network-Guided Semantic Path Reasoning for Equipment Maintenance Knowledge Graph Completion

Knowledge graph completion via link prediction is critical for intelligent equipment maintenance systems to support accurate fault diagnosis and maintenance decision-making. However, existing approaches struggle to simultaneously capture local structural dependencies and perform effective multi-hop reasoning, due to limited receptive fields or inefficient path exploration mechanisms. Traditional path-based methods implicitly assume path symmetry, treating all reasoning chains equally without considering their task-specific relevance. To address this issue, we propose a GAT-guided semantic path reasoning framework that breaks this symmetry through attention-driven asymmetric weighting, integrating local structural encoding with global multi-hop inference. The key innovation lies in a target-guided biased path sampling strategy, which transforms graph attention network (GAT) attention weights into probabilistic transition biases, enabling adaptive exploration of high-quality semantic paths relevant to specific prediction targets. Specifically, GATs are employed to learn importance-aware local representations, which guide biased random walks to efficiently sample task-relevant reasoning paths while breaking the implicit symmetry assumption of uniform path exploration. The sampled paths are encoded and aggregated to form global semantic context representations, which are then fused with local embeddings through a gating mechanism for final link prediction. Extensive experiments on FB15k-237, WN18RR, and a real-world equipment maintenance knowledge graph demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an MRR of 0.614 on the maintenance dataset and 0.485 on WN18RR. Further analysis shows that the learned path attention weights provide interpretable asymmetric reasoning evidence, enhancing transparency and trustworthiness for safety-critical maintenance applications.