Relational Graph Transformer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dwivedi, Vijay Prakash, Jaladi, Sri, Shen, Yangyi, López, Federico, Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I., Puri, Rishi, Fey, Matthias, Leskovec, Jure
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dwivedi, Vijay Prakash
Jaladi, Sri
Shen, Yangyi
López, Federico
Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I.
Puri, Rishi
Fey, Matthias
Leskovec, Jure
author_facet Dwivedi, Vijay Prakash
Jaladi, Sri
Shen, Yangyi
López, Federico
Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I.
Puri, Rishi
Fey, Matthias
Leskovec, Jure
contents Relational Deep Learning (RDL) is a promising approach for building state-of-the-art predictive models on multi-table relational data by representing it as a heterogeneous temporal graph. However, commonly used Graph Neural Network models suffer from fundamental limitations in capturing complex structural patterns and long-range dependencies that are inherent in relational data. While Graph Transformers have emerged as powerful alternatives to GNNs on general graphs, applying them to relational entity graphs presents unique challenges: (i) Traditional positional encodings fail to generalize to massive, heterogeneous graphs; (ii) existing architectures cannot model the temporal dynamics and schema constraints of relational data; (iii) existing tokenization schemes lose critical structural information. Here we introduce the Relational Graph Transformer (RelGT), the first graph transformer architecture designed specifically for relational tables. RelGT employs a novel multi-element tokenization strategy that decomposes each node into five components (features, type, hop distance, time, and local structure), enabling efficient encoding of heterogeneity, temporality, and topology without expensive precomputation. Our architecture combines local attention over sampled subgraphs with global attention to learnable centroids, incorporating both local and database-wide representations. Across 21 tasks from the RelBench benchmark, RelGT consistently matches or outperforms GNN baselines by up to 18%, establishing Graph Transformers as a powerful architecture for Relational Deep Learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10960
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relational Graph Transformer
Dwivedi, Vijay Prakash
Jaladi, Sri
Shen, Yangyi
López, Federico
Kanatsoulis, Charilaos I.
Puri, Rishi
Fey, Matthias
Leskovec, Jure
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Relational Deep Learning (RDL) is a promising approach for building state-of-the-art predictive models on multi-table relational data by representing it as a heterogeneous temporal graph. However, commonly used Graph Neural Network models suffer from fundamental limitations in capturing complex structural patterns and long-range dependencies that are inherent in relational data. While Graph Transformers have emerged as powerful alternatives to GNNs on general graphs, applying them to relational entity graphs presents unique challenges: (i) Traditional positional encodings fail to generalize to massive, heterogeneous graphs; (ii) existing architectures cannot model the temporal dynamics and schema constraints of relational data; (iii) existing tokenization schemes lose critical structural information. Here we introduce the Relational Graph Transformer (RelGT), the first graph transformer architecture designed specifically for relational tables. RelGT employs a novel multi-element tokenization strategy that decomposes each node into five components (features, type, hop distance, time, and local structure), enabling efficient encoding of heterogeneity, temporality, and topology without expensive precomputation. Our architecture combines local attention over sampled subgraphs with global attention to learnable centroids, incorporating both local and database-wide representations. Across 21 tasks from the RelBench benchmark, RelGT consistently matches or outperforms GNN baselines by up to 18%, establishing Graph Transformers as a powerful architecture for Relational Deep Learning.
title Relational Graph Transformer
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10960