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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).