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Main Authors: Carballo-Castro, Alba, Madeira, Manuel, Qin, Yiming, Thanou, Dorina, Frossard, Pascal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16404
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author Carballo-Castro, Alba
Madeira, Manuel
Qin, Yiming
Thanou, Dorina
Frossard, Pascal
author_facet Carballo-Castro, Alba
Madeira, Manuel
Qin, Yiming
Thanou, Dorina
Frossard, Pascal
contents Directed graphs naturally model systems with asymmetric, ordered relationships, essential to applications in biology, transportation, social networks, and visual understanding. Generating such graphs enables tasks such as simulation, data augmentation and novel instance discovery; however, directed graph generation remains underexplored. We identify two key factors limiting progress in this direction: first, modeling edge directionality introduces a substantially larger dependency space, making the underlying distribution harder to learn; second, the absence of standardized benchmarks hinders rigorous evaluation. Addressing the former requires more expressive models that are sensitive to directional topologies. We propose Directo, the first generative model for directed graphs built upon the discrete flow matching framework. Our approach combines: (i) principled positional encodings tailored to asymmetric pairwise relations, (ii) a dual-attention mechanism capturing both incoming and outgoing dependencies, and (iii) a robust, discrete generative framework. To support evaluation, we introduce a benchmark suite covering synthetic and real-world datasets. It shows that our method performs strongly across diverse settings and even competes with specialized models for particular classes, such as directed acyclic graphs. Our results highlight the effectiveness and generality of our approach, establishing a solid foundation for future research in directed graph generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_16404
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generating Directed Graphs with Dual Attention and Asymmetric Encoding
Carballo-Castro, Alba
Madeira, Manuel
Qin, Yiming
Thanou, Dorina
Frossard, Pascal
Machine Learning
Directed graphs naturally model systems with asymmetric, ordered relationships, essential to applications in biology, transportation, social networks, and visual understanding. Generating such graphs enables tasks such as simulation, data augmentation and novel instance discovery; however, directed graph generation remains underexplored. We identify two key factors limiting progress in this direction: first, modeling edge directionality introduces a substantially larger dependency space, making the underlying distribution harder to learn; second, the absence of standardized benchmarks hinders rigorous evaluation. Addressing the former requires more expressive models that are sensitive to directional topologies. We propose Directo, the first generative model for directed graphs built upon the discrete flow matching framework. Our approach combines: (i) principled positional encodings tailored to asymmetric pairwise relations, (ii) a dual-attention mechanism capturing both incoming and outgoing dependencies, and (iii) a robust, discrete generative framework. To support evaluation, we introduce a benchmark suite covering synthetic and real-world datasets. It shows that our method performs strongly across diverse settings and even competes with specialized models for particular classes, such as directed acyclic graphs. Our results highlight the effectiveness and generality of our approach, establishing a solid foundation for future research in directed graph generation.
title Generating Directed Graphs with Dual Attention and Asymmetric Encoding
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16404