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Main Authors: Wang, Zhe, Shi, Jiaxin, Heess, Nicolas, Gretton, Arthur, Titsias, Michalis K.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05979
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author Wang, Zhe
Shi, Jiaxin
Heess, Nicolas
Gretton, Arthur
Titsias, Michalis K.
author_facet Wang, Zhe
Shi, Jiaxin
Heess, Nicolas
Gretton, Arthur
Titsias, Michalis K.
contents Autoregressive models (ARMs) have become the workhorse for sequence generation tasks, since many problems can be modeled as next-token prediction. While there appears to be a natural ordering for text (i.e., left-to-right), for many data types, such as graphs, the canonical ordering is less obvious. To address this problem, we introduce a variant of ARM that generates high-dimensional data using a probabilistic ordering that is sequentially inferred from data. This model incorporates a trainable probability distribution, referred to as an order-policy, that dynamically decides the autoregressive order in a state-dependent manner. To train the model, we introduce a variational lower bound on the log-likelihood, which we optimize with stochastic gradient estimation. We demonstrate experimentally that our method can learn meaningful autoregressive orderings in image and graph generation. On the challenging domain of molecular graph generation, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the QM9 and ZINC250k benchmarks, evaluated across key metrics for distribution similarity and drug-likeless.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05979
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning-Order Autoregressive Models with Application to Molecular Graph Generation
Wang, Zhe
Shi, Jiaxin
Heess, Nicolas
Gretton, Arthur
Titsias, Michalis K.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Autoregressive models (ARMs) have become the workhorse for sequence generation tasks, since many problems can be modeled as next-token prediction. While there appears to be a natural ordering for text (i.e., left-to-right), for many data types, such as graphs, the canonical ordering is less obvious. To address this problem, we introduce a variant of ARM that generates high-dimensional data using a probabilistic ordering that is sequentially inferred from data. This model incorporates a trainable probability distribution, referred to as an order-policy, that dynamically decides the autoregressive order in a state-dependent manner. To train the model, we introduce a variational lower bound on the log-likelihood, which we optimize with stochastic gradient estimation. We demonstrate experimentally that our method can learn meaningful autoregressive orderings in image and graph generation. On the challenging domain of molecular graph generation, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the QM9 and ZINC250k benchmarks, evaluated across key metrics for distribution similarity and drug-likeless.
title Learning-Order Autoregressive Models with Application to Molecular Graph Generation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05979