Papers › Transformers Meet Directed Graphs
Transformers Meet Directed Graphs
Simon Geisler, Yujia Li, Daniel Mankowitz, Ali Taylan Cemgil, Stephan Günnemann, Cosmin Paduraru
Transformers were originally proposed as a sequence-to-sequence model for text but have become vital for a wide range of modalities, including images, audio, video, and undirected graphs. However, transformers for directed graphs are a surprisingly underexplored topic, despite their applicability to ubiquitous domains, including source code and logic circuits. In this work, we propose two direction- and structure-aware positional encodings for directed graphs: (1) the eigenvectors of the Magnetic Laplacian - a direction-aware generalization of the combinatorial Laplacian; (2) directional random walk encodings. Empirically, we show that the extra directionality information is useful in various downstream tasks, including correctness testing of sorting networks and source code understanding. Together with a data-flow-centric graph construction, our model outperforms the prior state of the art on the Open Graph Benchmark Code2 relatively by 14.7%.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graph Property Prediction | ogbg-code2 | SAT++ with Magnetic Laplacian | Ext. data | No | #1 of 21 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Graph Property Prediction | ogbg-code2 | SAT++ with Magnetic Laplacian | Number of params | 14378069 | #1 of 21 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Graph Property Prediction | ogbg-code2 | SAT++ with Magnetic Laplacian | Test F1 score | 0.2222 ± 0.0010 | #1 of 21 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Graph Property Prediction | ogbg-code2 | SAT++ with Magnetic Laplacian | Validation F1 score | 0.2044 ± 0.0020 | #1 of 21 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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