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Main Authors: Wang, Xiyuan, Liu, Yewei, Pang, Lexi, Chen, Siwei, Zhang, Muhan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02488
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author Wang, Xiyuan
Liu, Yewei
Pang, Lexi
Chen, Siwei
Zhang, Muhan
author_facet Wang, Xiyuan
Liu, Yewei
Pang, Lexi
Chen, Siwei
Zhang, Muhan
contents Diffusion models have gained popularity in graph generation tasks; however, the extent of their expressivity concerning the graph distributions they can learn is not fully understood. Unlike models in other domains, popular backbones for graph diffusion models, such as Graph Transformers, do not possess universal expressivity to accurately model the distribution scores of complex graph data. Our work addresses this limitation by focusing on the frequency of specific substructures as a key characteristic of target graph distributions. When evaluating existing models using this metric, we find that they fail to maintain the distribution of substructure counts observed in the training set when generating new graphs. To address this issue, we establish a theoretical connection between the expressivity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and the overall performance of graph diffusion models, demonstrating that more expressive GNN backbones can better capture complex distribution patterns. By integrating advanced GNNs into the backbone architecture, we achieve significant improvements in substructure generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02488
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do Graph Diffusion Models Accurately Capture and Generate Substructure Distributions?
Wang, Xiyuan
Liu, Yewei
Pang, Lexi
Chen, Siwei
Zhang, Muhan
Machine Learning
Diffusion models have gained popularity in graph generation tasks; however, the extent of their expressivity concerning the graph distributions they can learn is not fully understood. Unlike models in other domains, popular backbones for graph diffusion models, such as Graph Transformers, do not possess universal expressivity to accurately model the distribution scores of complex graph data. Our work addresses this limitation by focusing on the frequency of specific substructures as a key characteristic of target graph distributions. When evaluating existing models using this metric, we find that they fail to maintain the distribution of substructure counts observed in the training set when generating new graphs. To address this issue, we establish a theoretical connection between the expressivity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and the overall performance of graph diffusion models, demonstrating that more expressive GNN backbones can better capture complex distribution patterns. By integrating advanced GNNs into the backbone architecture, we achieve significant improvements in substructure generation.
title Do Graph Diffusion Models Accurately Capture and Generate Substructure Distributions?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02488