Relational Graph Transformer

TL;DR

This paper introduces RelGT, a novel relational graph transformer architecture that effectively models complex, heterogeneous, and temporal relational data, outperforming traditional GNNs on multiple benchmark tasks.

Contribution

RelGT is the first graph transformer tailored for relational tables, using a multi-element tokenization strategy to encode heterogeneity, temporality, and topology efficiently.

Findings

RelGT matches or exceeds GNN performance on 21 benchmark tasks.

RelGT outperforms GNN baselines by up to 18%.

The architecture effectively captures complex relational structures.

Abstract

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.