Form follows Function: Text-to-Text Conditional Graph Generation based on Functional Requirements

Abstract: This work focuses on the novel problem setting of generating graphs conditioned on a description of the graph's functional requirements in a downstream task. We pose the problem as a text-to-text generation problem and focus on the approach of fine-tuning a pretrained LLM to generate graphs. We propose an inductive bias which incorporates information about the structure of the graph into the LLM's generation process by incorporating message passing layers into an LLM's architecture. To evaluate our proposed method, we design a novel set of experiments using publicly available and widely studied molecule and knowledge graph data sets. Results suggest our proposed approach generates graphs which more closely meet the requested functional requirements, outperforming baselines developed on similar tasks by a statistically significant margin.