mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Semantically Consistent Discrete Diffusion for 3D Biological Graph Modeling

arXiv 2507.04856 ↗First posted 7 Jul 2025cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: Diffusion models → Medical imaging and segmentation

Abstract (arXiv)

3D spatial graphs play a crucial role in biological and clinical research by modeling anatomical networks such as blood vessels,neurons, and airways. However, generating 3D biological graphs while maintaining anatomical validity remains challenging, a key limitation of existing diffusion-based methods. In this work, we propose a novel 3D biological graph generation method that adheres to structural and semantic plausibility conditions. We achieve this by using a novel projection operator during sampling that stochastically fixes inconsistencies. Further, we adopt a superior edge-deletion-based noising procedure suitable for sparse biological graphs. Our method demonstrates superior performance on two real-world datasets, human circle of Willis and lung airways, compared to previous approaches. Importantly, we demonstrate that the generated samples significantly enhance downstream graph labeling performance. Furthermore, we show that our generative model is a reasonable out-of-the-box link predictior.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 14 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

Builds on

14 of 27 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 20243D Vessel Graph Generation Using Denoising Diffusion8 Jul

Other references · 13

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2021Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spacescited by 1,719
  3. 2023Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distributioncited by 745
  4. 2022DiGress: Discrete Denoising diffusion for graph generationcited by 520
  5. 2023Protein Design with Guided Discrete Diffusioncited by 157
  6. 2023MiDi: Mixed Graph and 3D Denoising Diffusion for Molecule Generationcited by 98
  7. 2023The TopCoW Challenge -- Topology-Aware Circle of Willis Segmentation for CT and MR Angiographycited by 50
  8. 2024Generative Modelling of Structurally Constrained Graphscited by 19
  9. 2024vesselFM: A Foundation Model for Universal 3D Blood Vessel Segmentationcited by 18
  10. 2021Scalable Robust Graph and Feature Extraction for Arbitrary Vessel Networks in Large Volumetric Datasetscited by 17
  11. 2023VesselVAE: Recursive Variational Autoencoders for 3D Blood Vessel Synthesiscited by 13
  12. 2024MorphGrower: A Synchronized Layer-by-layer Growing Approach for Plausible Neuronal Morphology Generationcited by 2
1 more
  1. 2022Rigorous mathematical optimization of synthetic hepatic vascular treescited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

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  1. 2025Graph Conditioned Diffusion for Controllable Histopathology Image Generation
  2. 2024DeFoG: Discrete Flow Matching for Graph Generation
  3. 2023Shape-guided Conditional Latent Diffusion Models for Synthesising Brain Vasculature
  4. 2023Tertiary Lymphoid Structures Generation through Graph-based Diffusion
  5. 2026Autoregressive Frontier Expansion: Growing Trees with Graph Machine Learning
  6. 2024TrIND: Representing Anatomical Trees by Denoising Diffusion of Implicit Neural Fields
  7. 2025StructDiff: Structure-aware Diffusion Model for 3D Fine-grained Medical Image Synthesis
  8. 2026Sketch2CT: Multimodal Diffusion for Structure-Aware 3D Medical Volume Generation