English

Gaussian Relational Graph Transformer

Machine Learning 2026-05-18 v1 Databases

Abstract

Relational graph learning models relational databases as graphs and has demonstrated superior performance on a wide range of relational predictive tasks. However, existing methods struggle to capture long-range dependencies due to information decay in their message-passing mechanisms, and recent relational graph transformers remain limited in jointly modeling structural, semantic, and temporal information. In this paper, we propose GelGT, a Gaussian relational graph transformer that explicitly addresses these challenges. GelGT introduces a structure-semantic collaborative sampling strategy to preserve structural connectivity while filtering irrelevant semantic information, and incorporates a Gaussian graph attention mechanism with a learnable Gaussian bias on the sampled subgraphs to dynamically encode temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that GelGT achieves state-of-the-art downstream task performance, with up to a 13.8% improvement in predictive performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.15575,
  title  = {Gaussian Relational Graph Transformer},
  author = {Zezhong Ding and Jin Li and Xugang Wang and Xike Xie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.15575},
  year   = {2026}
}