Flatten Graphs as Sequences: Transformers are Scalable Graph Generators

Abstract: We introduce AutoGraph, a novel autoregressive framework for generating large attributed graphs using decoder-only transformers. At the core of our approach is a reversible "flattening" process that transforms graphs into random sequences. By sampling and learning from these sequences, AutoGraph enables transformers to model and generate complex graph structures in a manner akin to natural language. In contrast to diffusion models that rely on computationally intensive node features, our approach operates exclusively on these sequences. The sampling complexity and sequence length scale linearly with the number of edges, making AutoGraph highly scalable for generating large sparse graphs. Empirically, AutoGraph achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse synthetic and molecular graph generation benchmarks, while delivering a 100-fold generation and a 3-fold training speedup compared to leading diffusion models. Additionally, it demonstrates promising transfer capabilities and supports substructure-conditioned generation without additional fine-tuning. By extending language modeling techniques to graph generation, this work paves the way for developing graph foundation models.