Path to Prior-Data Fitted Relational Models via Learned Latent Multi-table Representations

Abstract

Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) show that pretraining on large populations of synthetic tasks can enable generalization to unseen datasets with little or no downstream fine-tuning. This paradigm is effective for transformer-based tabular and relational foundation models such as RDB-PFN, but remains largely unexplored for graph-based relational models built on message passing. We pretrain the graph-based relational foundation model Griffin on large collections of synthetic relational databases and ask whether curriculum learning, which benefits transformer-based relational learners, also improves message-passing representations. Rather than fine-tune on downstream tasks, we use the pretrained encoder as a general-purpose relational representation learner and pass its latent representations to a frozen in-context predictor (\ticl{}); no component is trained on the target task. On 16 real-world relational classification tasks, evaluated over five seeds against raw-feature and untrained-encoder baselines, a purely synthetic curriculum that begins with schema-guided data and continues with schema-agnostic data gives the strongest frozen in-context performance\rev{, outperforming real-data-only pretraining and every unordered single-stage mixture of the corpora; when appended after real-data pretraining, it yields the best encoders overall}. These results provide initial evidence that PFN-style synthetic pretraining transfers to graph-based relational foundation models.