Graph-Conditional Flow Matching for Relational Data Generation
Davide Scassola, Sebastiano Saccani, Luca Bortolussi
Abstract
Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacy-enhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.
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Cited by top-tier papers3
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- TabGeoFlow: A Geometric Flow Matching Model for Tabular Data SynthesisJong In ChoiAAAI 2026
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- Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image SynthesisPrafulla Dhariwal, Alexander Quinn NicholNeurIPS 2021 · 13,211 citations
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- Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent SpaceHengrui Zhang, Jiani Zhang, Zhengyuan Shen, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan et al.ICLR 2024 · 233 citations
- Variational Flow Matching for Graph GenerationFloor Eijkelboom, Grigory Bartosh, Christian Andersson Naesseth, Max Welling et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 96 citations
- Flow Matching for Generative ModelingYaron Lipman, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Heli Ben-Hamu, Maximilian Nickel et al.ICLR 2023 · 87 citations
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