# Adaptive Edge Learning for Density-Aware Graph Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23052/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [TUDataset: A collection of benchmark datasets for learning with graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08663/) (2020)
- [MolGAN: An implicit generative model for small molecular graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11973/) (2018)
- [GraphVAE: Towards Generation of Small Graphs Using Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03480/) (2018)
- [Graph Convolutional Policy Network for Goal-Directed Molecular Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02473/) (2018)
- [NIPS 2016 Tutorial: Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00160/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Generative Models of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03324/) (2018)
- [GraphGAN: Graph Representation Learning with Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08267/) (2017)
- [Labeled Graph Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03220/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Evolutionary Refinement of Generative Graph Topologies: A Hybrid WGAN-GA Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29161/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating realistic graph-structured data is challenging due to discrete structures, variable sizes, and class-specific connectivity patterns that resist conventional generative modelling. While recent graph generation methods employ generative adversarial network (GAN) frameworks to handle permutation invariance and irregular topologies, they typically rely on random edge sampling with fixed probabilities, limiting their capacity to capture complex structural dependencies between nodes. We propose a density-aware conditional graph generation framework using Wasserstein GANs (WGAN) that replaces random sampling with a learnable distance-based edge predictor. Our approach embeds nodes into a latent space where proximity correlates with edge likelihood, enabling the generator to learn meaningful connectivity patterns. A differentiable edge predictor determines pairwise relationships directly from node embeddings, while a density-aware selection mechanism adaptively controls edge density to match class-specific sparsity distributions observed in real graphs. We train the model using a WGAN with gradient penalty, employing a GCN-based critic to ensure generated graphs exhibit realistic topology and align with target class distributions. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method produces graphs with superior structural coherence and class-consistent connectivity compared to existing baselines. The learned edge predictor captures complex relational patterns beyond simple heuristics, generating graphs whose density and topology closely match real structural distributions. Our results show improved training stability and controllable synthesis, making the framework effective for realistic graph generation and data augmentation. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ava-12/Density_Aware_WGAN.git.