Relatron: Automating Relational Machine Learning over Relational Databases

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22552v1
• Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:45:22 GMT
• Title: Relatron: Automating Relational Machine Learning over Relational Databases
• Authors: Zhikai Chen, Han Xie, Jian Zhang, Jiliang Tang, Xiang Song, Huzefa Rangwala,
• Abstract summary: We present a study that unifies RDL and DFS in a shared design space and conducts architecture-centric searches across diverse RDB tasks.<n>Our analysis yields three key findings: (1) RDL does not consistently outperform DFS, with performance being highly task-dependent; (2) no single architecture dominates across tasks, underscoring the need for task-aware model selection; and accuracy is an unreliable guide for choice architecture.
• Score: 50.94254514286021
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Predictive modeling over relational databases (RDBs) powers applications, yet remains challenging due to capturing both cross-table dependencies and complex feature interactions. Relational Deep Learning (RDL) methods automate feature engineering via message passing, while classical approaches like Deep Feature Synthesis (DFS) rely on predefined non-parametric aggregators. Despite performance gains, the comparative advantages of RDL over DFS and the design principles for selecting effective architectures remain poorly understood. We present a comprehensive study that unifies RDL and DFS in a shared design space and conducts architecture-centric searches across diverse RDB tasks. Our analysis yields three key findings: (1) RDL does not consistently outperform DFS, with performance being highly task-dependent; (2) no single architecture dominates across tasks, underscoring the need for task-aware model selection; and (3) validation accuracy is an unreliable guide for architecture choice. This search yields a model performance bank that links architecture configurations to their performance; leveraging this bank, we analyze the drivers of the RDL-DFS performance gap and introduce two task signals -- RDB task homophily and an affinity embedding that captures size, path, feature, and temporal structure -- whose correlation with the gap enables principled routing. Guided by these signals, we propose Relatron, a task embedding-based meta-selector that chooses between RDL and DFS and prunes the within-family search. Lightweight loss-landscape metrics further guard against brittle checkpoints by preferring flatter optima. In experiments, Relatron resolves the "more tuning, worse performance" effect and, in joint hyperparameter-architecture optimization, achieves up to 18.5% improvement over strong baselines with 10x lower cost than Fisher information-based alternatives.

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