# Unsupervised Discovery of Steerable Factors When Graph Deep Generative Models Are Entangled

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17123/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Disentangling by Factorising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05983/) (2018)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation for Graph Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05718/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [Analyzing Learned Molecular Representations for Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01561/) (2019)
- [GAN Inversion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05278/) (2021)
- [Graph Convolutional Policy Network for Goal-Directed Molecular Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02473/) (2018)
- [Point-GNN: Graph Neural Network for 3D Object Detection in a Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01251/) (2020)
- [StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12799/) (2020)
- [How to Train Your Energy-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03288/) (2021)
- [StyleRig: Rigging StyleGAN for 3D Control over Portrait Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00121/) (2020)
- [Molecular De Novo Design through Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07555/) (2017)
- [On the "steerability" of generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07171/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Improving Equivariant Networks with Probabilistic Symmetry Breaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21985/) (2025)
- [What's Producible May Not Be Reachable: Measuring the Steerability of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17482/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep generative models (DGMs) have been widely developed for graph data. However, much less investigation has been carried out on understanding the latent space of such pretrained graph DGMs. These understandings possess the potential to provide constructive guidelines for crucial tasks, such as graph controllable generation. Thus in this work, we are interested in studying this problem and propose GraphCG, a method for the unsupervised discovery of steerable factors in the latent space of pretrained graph DGMs. We first examine the representation space of three pretrained graph DGMs with six disentanglement metrics, and we observe that the pretrained representation space is entangled. Motivated by this observation, GraphCG learns the steerable factors via maximizing the mutual information between semantic-rich directions, where the controlled graph moving along the same direction will share the same steerable factors. We quantitatively verify that GraphCG outperforms four competitive baselines on two graph DGMs pretrained on two molecule datasets. Additionally, we qualitatively illustrate seven steerable factors learned by GraphCG on five pretrained DGMs over five graph datasets, including two for molecules and three for point clouds.