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.
By Liheng Ma, Soumyasundar Pal, Yingxue Zhang, Philip H. S. Torr, Mark Coates
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.
By Quang Truong, Yu Song, Donald Loveland, Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Jiliang Tang
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.
By Chaohao Yuan, Kangfei Zhao, Ercan Engin Kuruoglu, Liang Wang, Tingyang Xu, Wenbing Huang, Deli Zhao, Hong Cheng, Yu Rong
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.
By Kushal Bose, Swagatam Das
arXiv:2606. 03712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Language Models (GLMs) have become a promising direction for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to graph learning tasks.
By Ding Zhang, Runtao Zhou, Wenqing Zheng, Rizal Fathony, Bayan Bruss, Chirag Agarwal
arXiv:2503. 01805v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning.
By Gilad Yehudai, Clayton Sanford, Maya Bechler-Speicher, Orr Fischer, Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Amir Globerson