# QUARTET: Quad-branch cross-Attention and Random-walk Traces for Enhancing Transformers on Relational Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26855 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26855/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Predict then Propagate: Graph Neural Networks meet Personalized PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05997/) (2018)
- [Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02244/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12454/) (2022)
- [TabPFN: A Transformer That Solves Small Tabular Classification Problems in a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01848/) (2022)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [On the Bottleneck of Graph Neural Networks and its Practical Implications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05205/) (2020)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [Temporal Graph Networks for Deep Learning on Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10637/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Graph Transformers with Spectral Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03893/) (2021)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07962/) (2020)
- [Graph Neural Networks with Learnable Structural and Positional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07875/) (2021)
- [What graph neural networks cannot learn: depth vs width](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03199/) (2019)
- [Structure-Aware Transformer for Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03036/) (2022)
- [Sign and Basis Invariant Networks for Spectral Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13013/) (2022)
- [Scaling Graph Neural Networks with Approximate PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01570/) (2020)
- [Exphormer: Sparse Transformers for Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06147/) (2023)
- [GraphiT: Encoding Graph Structure in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05667/) (2021)
- [NAGphormer: A Tokenized Graph Transformer for Node Classification in Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04910/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Relational Deep Learning (RDL) models multi-table databases as heterogeneous temporal graphs, and graph transformers currently achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like RelBench. However, the current leading model, RelGT, suffers from two key limitations: its random local sampler yields loosely connected subgraphs that hinder message passing, and its global attention module relies on a single, seed-feature-based memory that ignores broader macro-level dynamics. To overcome these limitations, we introduce QUARTET, an expressive graph transformer architecture that applies full self-attention on local subgraphs while enriching global context through cross-attention branches. Specifically, QUARTET employs a Causal Random Walk (CRW) sampler based on recency-truncated Personalized PageRank (PPR) to extract compact, hub-robust, and densely connected local subgraphs without temporal leakage. Concurrently, a quad-branch cross-attention module integrates global context from four complementary perspectives: seed feature, seed topology, temporal dynamics, and collaborative dynamics. Across the RelBench v1 classification tasks, QUARTET consistently matches or outperforms the current state-of-the-art graph transformer baselines (HGT and RelGT). Ablation studies confirm that the CRW sampler significantly enriches local neighborhood quality, while the global branches provide essential, task-specific predictive gains.