arXiv · 2609.19832
MetaRTL: Meta-path Attention Enhanced Relational Table Learning
Abstract
Relational table learning has gained increasing attention with the widespread use of relational databases. Existing methods typically rely on deep GNN or HGNN stacks, leading to high computational costs and limited performance on large real-world databases. We propose MetaRTL, a two-stage framework for scalable and expressive relational table learning. In the first stage, MetaRTL obtains initial table embeddings via lightweight pre-training. In the second stage, it performs non-parametric message passing to derive meta-path features, which are then aggregated by an attention module, MetaAttn. By shifting computation from deep message passing to efficient meta-path aggregation, MetaRTL captures rich relational semantics while maintaining high efficiency. Experiments on 10 real-world datasets across 24 tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Ken Zhong, Weichen Li, Zheng Wang. 2026-09-17. MetaRTL: Meta-path Attention Enhanced Relational Table Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19832
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.