Joint Relational Database Generation via Graph-Conditional Diffusion Models

Mohamed Amine Ketata, David Lüdke, Leo Schwinn, Stephan Günnemann

Keywords: relational database generation, tabular data, generative models, diffusion models, graph neural networks

TL;DR: We propose the first non-autoregressive generative model for relational databases based on a graph view of the database, and we achieve state-of-the-art results on real-world RDBs.

Abstract: Building generative models for relational databases (RDBs) is important for many applications, such as privacy-preserving data release and augmenting real datasets. However, most prior works either focus on single-table generation or adapt single-table models to the multi-table setting by relying on autoregressive factorizations and sequential generation. These approaches limit parallelism, restrict flexibility in downstream applications, and compound errors due to commonly made conditional independence assumptions. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally different approach: jointly modeling all tables in an RDB without imposing any table order. By using a natural graph representation of RDBs, we propose the Graph-Conditional Relational Diffusion Model (GRDM), which leverages a graph neural network to jointly denoise row attributes and capture complex inter-table dependencies. Extensive experiments on six real-world RDBs demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms autoregressive baselines in modeling multi-hop inter-table correlations and achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-table fidelity metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/ketatam/rdb-diffusion.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 27917