AutoGrable: What Is a Good Graph for a Table?

Graph learning presupposes a graph, and tables and relational databases do not come with one. Applying a GNN to them requires deciding which entities become nodes, which of them to connect, and through which relations---a decision made by hand, by schema heuristics, or by training a model on every candidate graph and keeping the best. We give a criterion that requires no trained graph model. In the minimal table-to-graph abstraction each row is a node, so a message-passing GNN, bounded by 1-WL, sees a construction only as a partition of the rows into colour-refinement classes: a construction is good for a task when that partition separates rows with different labels and does not split rows that share one. AutoGrable turns this criterion into a construction procedure. For incidence constructions the partition is fixed by the selected columns, so building a graph reduces to choosing them, and we score a candidate subset by a label-alignment risk: the held-out risk of the best predictor constant on its blocks, penalised by an occupancy term measuring how thinly the blocks are populated. The score materialises no graph and trains no GNN, so AutoGrable can search the space of subsets greedily and cheaply, and returns the resulting grable for single tables and for foreign-key schemas alike. Our experiments show that over a space of candidate graphs the score discards a large fraction while retaining the best; that AutoGrable recovers the columns that generate the label on controlled tasks and outperforms fixed, random, and task-aware constructors on real tasks under a fixed predictor; and that it is the only method compared that can decline to build a graph when none helps.

Latent Bridges for Multi-Table Question Answering

We introduce GRAB, a constructor-encoder-bridge pipeline for table question answering. Our method lifts relational data into an heterogeneous graph, encodes it via message passing, and transfers the signals to an LLM through a small set of query-conditioned latent tokens. This provides the LLM with a compact, task-relevant structural representation together with the flattened text. Crucially, the LLM remains strictly frozen to preserve its general reasoning capabilities; we train only the lightweight graph encoder and latent bridge (91M parameters), allowing the entire pipeline to be trained efficiently. Our pipeline significantly improves performance on relational Question Answering, with the largest gains in demanding multi-table settings, offering an efficient, principled way to connect relational deep learning with LLMs.

Grables: Tabular Learning Beyond Independent Rows

Tabular learning is still dominated by row-wise predictors that score each row independently, which fits i.i.d. benchmarks but fails on transactional, temporal, and relational tables where labels depend on other rows. We show that row-wise prediction rules out natural targets driven by global counts, overlaps, and relational patterns. To make "using structure" precise across architectures, we introduce grables: a modular interface that separates how a table is lifted to a graph (constructor) from how predictions are computed on that graph (node predictor), pinpointing where expressive power comes from. Experiments on synthetic tasks, transaction data, and a RelBench clinical-trials dataset confirm the predicted separations: message passing captures inter-row dependencies that row-local models miss, and hybrid approaches that explicitly extract inter-row structure and feed it to strong tabular learners yield consistent gains.

A neuro-symbolic framework for answering conjunctive queries

The problem of answering logical queries over incomplete knowledge graphs is receiving significant attention in the machine learning community. Neuro-symbolic models are a promising recent approach, showing good performance and allowing for good interpretability properties. These models rely on trained architectures to execute atomic queries, combining them with modules that simulate the symbolic operators in queries. Unfortunately, most neuro-symbolic query processors are limited to the so-called tree-like logical queries that admit a bottom-up execution, where the leaves are constant values or anchors, and the root is the target variable. Tree-like queries, while expressive, fail short to express properties in knowledge graphs that are important in practice, such as the existence of multiple edges between entities or the presence of triangles. We propose a framework for answering arbitrary conjunctive queries over incomplete knowledge graphs. The main idea of our method is to approximate a cyclic query by an infinite family of tree-like queries, and then leverage existing models for the latter. Our approximations achieve strong guarantees: they are complete, i.e. there are no false negatives, and optimal, i.e. they provide the best possible approximation using tree-like queries. Our method requires the approximations to be tree-like queries where the leaves are anchors or existentially quantified variables. Hence, we also show how some of the existing neuro-symbolic models can handle these queries, which is of independent interest. Experiments show that our approximation strategy achieves competitive results, and that including queries with existentially quantified variables tends to improve the general performance of these models, both on tree-like queries and on our approximation strategy.