Papers › Graph2Seq: Graph to Sequence Learning with Attention-based Neural Networks

Graph2Seq: Graph to Sequence Learning with Attention-based Neural Networks

3 Apr 2018ICLR 2019 5arXiv:1804.00823archive 2025-07-28

Kun Xu, Lingfei Wu, Zhiguo Wang, Yansong Feng, Michael Witbrock, Vadim Sheinin

The celebrated Sequence to Sequence learning (Seq2Seq) technique and its numerous variants achieve excellent performance on many tasks. However, many machine learning tasks have inputs naturally represented as graphs; existing Seq2Seq models face a significant challenge in achieving accurate conversion from graph form to the appropriate sequence. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel general end-to-end graph-to-sequence neural encoder-decoder model that maps an input graph to a sequence of vectors and uses an attention-based LSTM method to decode the target sequence from these vectors. Our method first generates the node and graph embeddings using an improved graph-based neural network with a novel aggregation strategy to incorporate edge direction information in the node embeddings. We further introduce an attention mechanism that aligns node embeddings and the decoding sequence to better cope with large graphs. Experimental results on bAbI, Shortest Path, and Natural Language Generation tasks demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforms existing graph neural networks, Seq2Seq, and Tree2Seq models; using the proposed bi-directional node embedding aggregation strategy, the model can converge rapidly to the optimal performance.

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Code

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IBM/Graph2Seq officialmentioned in papertfApache-2.0 report
Attn-to-FC/Attn-to-FC mentioned on GitHubtf report
ReleasedBrainiac/GraphToSequenceNN mentioned on GitHubtfnot reachable when probed 2026-09-18 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report
dice-group/NABU mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report

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get_layer_uid IBM/Graph2Seq/main/layers.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b82968db452628fd · report
zeros IBM/Graph2Seq/main/inits.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b190ef9c60b2629a · report
batch IBM/Graph2Seq/main/helpers.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · fe5a62319b44915c · report
cons_batch_graph IBM/Graph2Seq/main/data_collector.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4341bd2e76ed19d1 · report
cosine_distance IBM/Graph2Seq/main/layer_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d38de6c77953b59d · report
dropout_layer IBM/Graph2Seq/main/layer_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5880ee955c15a36d · report
evaluate IBM/Graph2Seq/main/evaluator.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4dde04be7ce0578e · report
glorot IBM/Graph2Seq/main/inits.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1b491f3f784b7cb0 · report
my_lstm_layer IBM/Graph2Seq/main/layer_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 73d006716b76680e · report
uniform IBM/Graph2Seq/main/inits.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b0d1b78daecde7e9 · report

Tasks

DecoderGraph-to-SequenceSQL-to-TextText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
SQL-to-Text WikiSQL Graph2Seq-PGE BLEU-4 38.97 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

LSTMSeq2SeqSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

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