Graph-Conditional Flow Matching for Relational Data Generation
On the map: Diffusion models → Flow matching, time series and science
Abstract (arXiv)
Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacy-enhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2025.
Builds on
33 of 51 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
- 2024TabDiff: a Mixed-type Diffusion Model for Tabular Data Generation27 Oct
- 2024Variational Flow Matching for Graph Generation7 Jun
- 2024ClavaDDPM: Multi-relational Data Synthesis with Cluster-guided Diffusion Models28 May
- 2023Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Space14 Oct
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modeling6 Oct
- 2022TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Models30 Sep
Other references · 27
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
- 2016Layer Normalizationcited by 5,669
- 2016XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting Systemcited by 5,166
- 2018How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?cited by 4,393
- 2013Auto-Encoding Variational Bayescited by 4,053
- 2018Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networkscited by 1,360
- 2017Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learningcited by 950
- 2021How Attentive are Graph Attention Networks?cited by 835
- 2019Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GANcited by 699
- 2021Tabular Data: Deep Learning is Not All You Needcited by 535
15 more
- 2021Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: A Surveycited by 491
- 2018Data Synthesis based on Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 185
- 2023REaLTabFormer: Generating Realistic Relational and Tabular Data using Transformerscited by 94
- 2018Synthesizing Tabular Data using Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 92
- 2019Graphical-model based estimation and inference for differential privacycited by 74
- 2022A Survey on Deep Graph Generation: Methods and Applicationscited by 69
- 2023Generating and Imputing Tabular Data via Diffusion and Flow-based Gradient-Boosted Treescited by 62
- 2023TabMT: Generating tabular data with masked transformerscited by 36
- 2022Row Conditional-TGAN for generating synthetic relational databasescited by 15
- 2023DP-TBART: A Transformer-based Autoregressive Model for Differentially Private Tabular Data Generationcited by 13
- 2022Generating Realistic Synthetic Relational Data through Graph Variational Autoencoderscited by 8
- 2025Synthetic Data Privacy Metricscited by 8
- 2024Benchmarking the Fidelity and Utility of Synthetic Relational Datacited by 7
- 2023Privacy Measurement in Tabular Synthetic Data: State of the Art and Future Research Directionscited by 4
- 2025Contrastive Learning-Based privacy metrics in Tabular Synthetic Datasetscited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 2.
3 papers.
- 2026PluRel: Synthetic Data unlocks Scaling Laws for Relational Foundation Modelscited by 19
- 2025Graph Flow Matching: Enhancing Image Generation with Neighbor-Aware Flow Fieldscited by 1
- 2026Interventional Flow Matching: Prospective Dose-Response Forecasting with Velocity-Field Jacobian Regularizationcited by 0
- 2026Interventional Flow Matching: Prospective Dose-Response Forecasting with Velocity-Field Jacobian Regularization28 Jun 2026
- 2026PluRel: Synthetic Data unlocks Scaling Laws for Relational Foundation Models3 Feb 2026
- 2025Graph Flow Matching: Enhancing Image Generation with Neighbor-Aware Flow Fields30 May 2025
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- 2026Finding Connections: Membership Inference Attacks for the Multi-Table Synthetic Data Setting
- 2026When Does Synthetic Relational Data Teach Models to Use Relations? Tracing Predictive Structure from Pretraining Data to Model Behavior
- 2024DeFoG: Discrete Flow Matching for Graph Generation
- 2025Flow Matching for Tabular Data Synthesis
- 2024Towards Privacy-Preserving Relational Data Synthesis via Probabilistic Relational Models