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Griffin: Towards a Graph-Centric Relational Database Foundation Model (arxiv.org)
3 points by PaulHoule on May 21, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Griffin turns a relational database into a graph and uses one pre-trained model for many different jobs, instead of training a separate model per task. On graphs of over 150 million nodes it matched or beat those task-specific models, especially with little training data.

Abstract

We introduce Griffin, the first foundation model attemptation designed specifically for Relational Databases (RDBs). Unlike previous smaller models focused on single RDB tasks, Griffin unifies the data encoder and task decoder to handle diverse tasks. Additionally, we enhance the architecture by incorporating a cross-attention module and a novel aggregator. Griffin utilizes pretraining on both single-table and RDB datasets, employing advanced encoders for categorical, numerical, and metadata features, along with innovative components such as cross-attention modules and enhanced message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) to capture the complexities of relational data. Evaluated on large-scale, heterogeneous, and temporal graphs extracted from RDBs across various domains (spanning over 150 million nodes), Griffin demonstrates superior or comparable performance to individually trained models, excels in low-data scenarios, and shows strong transferability with similarity and diversity in pretraining across new datasets and tasks, highlighting its potential as a universally applicable foundation model for RDBs. Code available at https://github.com/yanxwb/Griffin.

Yanbo Wang, Xiyuan Wang, Quan Gan, Minjie Wang, Qibin Yang, David Wipf, Muhan Zhang
arXiv:2505.05568 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DB · submitted May 8, 2025 · updated Jun 11, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Published at ICML 2025

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