The paper investigates whether prior‑data‑fitted networks (PFNs) can be extended to graph‑based relational models. The authors pretrain a message‑passing foundation model, Griffin, on large synthetic relational databases and evaluate its frozen encoder on 16 real‑world relational classification tasks. A curriculum that starts with schema‑guided synthetic data and then uses schema‑agnostic data yields the best in‑context performance, outperforming real‑data‑only pretraining and other mixtures.
By Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Viswanath Ganapathy
arXiv:2607. 29129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) require large-scale synthetic relational databases for pretraining, but existing approaches tightly couple data generation with the model training pipeline.
By Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Viswanath Ganapathy
The paper investigates why certain synthetic relational datasets lead to better relational foundation models. By training four Relational Transformer checkpoints on data from four different generators, the authors trace a measurable property of the data—specifically the predictive necessity of cross‑table information—to the emergence of relational computation in the models. They find that the RelDiff generator yields the largest predictive gain from foreign‑key‑linked parents, and its model uniquely responds to foreign‑key interventions, a dependence that persists across random initializations and grows with corrupted links. Disrupting this mechanism during downstream inference eliminates RelDiff’s advantage on relational tasks while leaving structure‑insensitive models largely unchanged, thereby linking synthetic data properties to learned mechanisms and downstream behavior.
By Shivam Dubey, Mohamed Bouadi, Nassim Bouarour, Varun Kulkarni, Aditya Tanna, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu
arXiv:2509. 21489v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph foundation models face several fundamental challenges including transferability across diverse domains and data scarcity, which calls into question the very feasibility of creating such models.
By Dmitry Eremeev, Oleg Platonov, Gleb Bazhenov, Artem Babenko, Liudmila Prokhorenkova
arXiv:2607. 29120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) such as RDB-PFN approximate Bayesian inference over multi-table relational databases by pretraining on millions of synthetic tasks.
By Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Viswanath Ganapathy
arXiv:2606. 04320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) promise a single pre-trained predictor that, given any relational database, returns predictions in one forward pass via relational in-context learning (ICL).
By Zhikai Chen, Junyu Yin, Jialiang Gu, Siheng Xiong, Xiaoze Liu, Ruowang Zhang, Keren Zhou, Kai Guo
arXiv:2607. 05476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a relational database (RDB) storing heterogeneous tabular information, how can we predict missing (or future) values in some target column of interest?
By Linjie Xu, David Wipf
arXiv:2605.14907v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Knowledge graph (KG) foundation models aim to generalize to graphs with unseen entities and relations by learning transferable relational structure...
By Yisen Gao, Jiaxin Bai, Haoyu Huang, Zhongwei Xie, Yufei Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Sirui Han, Yangqiu Song
arXiv:2606. 03040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational databases underpin modern enterprise, scientific, and healthcare systems, yet predictive machine learning on such data remains challenging due to their multi-table, heterogeneous, and temporal structure.
By Phillip Jiang
arXiv:2607. 11374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning transferable representations across diverse graph domains.
By Chunyu Hu, Tianyin Liao, Ge Lan, Xingxuan Zhang, Jianxin Li, Peng Cui, Ziwei Zhang
InRTL: Effective Intra-Inter Interaction Learning for Relational Tables proposes a unified framework that explicitly models dependencies both within and across relational tables. The approach introduces intra-table interactions to capture associations among rows in the same table and inter-table interactions to capture dependencies between rows linked by primary key–foreign key relationships. It employs a column-aware table encoder, Transformer-based self-attention and cross-attention modules, and incorporates linearized attention and heterogeneous graph neural networks to improve scalability, demonstrating effectiveness across ten datasets and 24 real-world tasks.
By Weichen Li, Ken Zhong, Zheng Wang, Li Pan, Jianhua Li
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can leverage frozen relational‑transformer embeddings by injecting them as soft tokens. Using a learned MLP projection and LoRA adaptation, the authors fine‑tune Qwen3.5‑4B on chain‑of‑thought reasoning traces and group‑based reinforcement learning, then evaluate on ten binary classification tasks across six RelBench databases. The hybrid approach consistently underperforms the standalone relational transformer, showing sensitivity to serialization format, token budget, and RL stability, leading the authors to conclude that stronger alignment objectives and schema‑aware design are needed for reliable relational prediction.
By Francisco Galuppo Azevedo, Clarissa Lima Loures