The paper shows that a plain Transformer can serve as an effective graph learner by adding three lightweight modifications: simplified L₂ attention, adaptive RMS normalization, and an MLP-based positional encoding stem. These changes preserve token magnitude and enable the model to achieve high expressivity on graph benchmarks, outperforming more complex graph transformer variants. The results suggest that plain Transformers can act as a unified backbone for multimodal learning across language, vision, and graph domains.
arXiv:2502. 16533v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated a strong capability in modeling graph structures by addressing the intrinsic limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), such as over-smoothing and over-squashing.
arXiv:2607. 01553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers have become general-purpose architectures, but their all-to-all self-attention is poorly matched to graph data, whose interactions are sparse, structured and multi-scale.
arXiv:2605.10247v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to graph-structured data usually involves multi-step pipelines in which textual node attributes are compresse...
arXiv:2602. 01553v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Link prediction is a core challenge in graph machine learning, demanding models that capture rich and complex topological dependencies.
The paper investigates Graph Transformers (GTs) that use Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based positional encodings. By analyzing GTs through manifold limit models, the authors establish a theoretical link between GTs and Manifold Neural Networks (MNNs), showing that GTs inherit transferability guarantees from their positional encodings. Experiments on standard graph benchmarks confirm that GTs scale comparably to GNNs, and a real‑world shortest‑path estimation task demonstrates their practical efficiency on large terrains.
arXiv:2509. 22259v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the extent to which rotary position encodings (RoPE), a recent transformer position encoding algorithm broadly adopted in large language models (LLMs) and vision transformers (ViTs), can be applied to graph-structured data.
Positional encodings (PEs) are essential for Transformers. Yet designing effective PEs for non-Euclidean graphs remains challenging.
arXiv:2602.15239v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers have achieved remarkable success across domains, motivating the rise of Graph Transformers (GTs) as attention-based architectures for...
The paper investigates how the choice of graph tokenization affects transformer expressivity. It analyzes three tokenization families—spectral, random‑walk, and adjacency—showing that each induces different depth requirements and that some tokenizations are inherently lossy or ill‑conditioned for certain tasks. The authors prove lower bounds and impossibility results for converting between tokenizations and validate these findings with experiments on synthetic and real‑world data.
arXiv:2606. 25293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) are essential for Transformers.
arXiv:2607. 17272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Node representation learning has advanced rapidly, yet most existing methods rely on per-dataset training and hyperparameter tuning.
HyPE-GT introduces a framework that generates learnable hyperbolic positional encodings for Graph Transformers, enabling the capture of complex hierarchical relationships in graph-structured data. Unlike traditional Euclidean encodings, HyPE’s hyperbolic encodings can be selected to suit specific downstream tasks and help mitigate oversmoothing in deep Graph Neural Networks. Experiments on molecular benchmarks and large-scale Open Graph Benchmark datasets demonstrate improved performance, while additional tests on Coauthor and Copurchase networks confirm HyPE’s effectiveness in controlling oversmoothing.