NeurIPS 2025

Toward a Unified Geometry Understanding: Riemannian Diffusion Framework for Graph Generation and Prediction

Yisen Gao, Xingcheng Fu, Qingyun Sun, Jianxin Li, Xianxian Li

Main figure for Toward a Unified Geometry Understanding: Riemannian Diffusion Framework for Graph Generation and Prediction

Abstract

Graph diffusion models have made significant progress in learning structured graph data and have demonstrated strong potential for predictive tasks. Existing approaches typically embed node, edge, and graph-level features into a unified latent space, modeling prediction tasks including classification and regression as a form of conditional generation. However, due to the non-Euclidean nature of graph data, features of different curvatures are entangled in the same latent space without releasing their geometric potential. To address this issue, we aim to construt an ideal Riemannian diffusion model to capture distinct manifold signatures of complex graph data and learn their distribution. This goal faces two challenges: numerical instability caused by exponential mapping during the encoding proces and manifold deviation during diffusion generation. To address these challenges, we propose GeoMancer: a novel Riemannian graph diffusion framework for both generation and prediction tasks. To mitigate numerical instability, we replace exponential mapping with an isometric-invariant Riemannian gyrokernel approach and decouple multi-level features onto their respective task-specific manifolds to learn optimal representations. To address manifold deviation, we introduce a manifold-constrained diffusion method and a self-guided strategy for unconditional generation, ensuring that the generated data remains aligned with the manifold signature. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating superior performance across a variety of tasks.

Proposed method: GeoMancer

Benchmark Results

Tested on 2 datasets 4 baseline values reported too low

Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).

Classic

#ModelAccuracy ↑Paper
1
GraphSAGE+CNA
0.9418 ±0.0033
2
GCN+CNA
0.9366 ±0.0048
3
TransformerConv
0.9350 ±0.0058
21
GCN
actual #21 vs paper #569 548 places worse
0.9004
best reported
actual #21 vs paper #569 548 places worse
paper 0.8160 ±0.0040
paper 0.8160 ±0.0040 Δ at pub 0.0844
39
SAGE
0.8911 ±0.0012
44
GAT
actual #44 vs paper #424 380 places worse
0.8897 ±0.0014
best reported
actual #44 vs paper #424 380 places worse
paper 0.8300 ±0.0070
291
Exphormer
actual #291 vs paper #446 155 places worse
0.8410 ±0.0080
best reported
actual #291 vs paper #446 155 places worse
paper 0.8277 ±0.0038
paper 0.8277 ±0.0038 Δ at pub 0.0133
314
GraphGPS
actual #314 vs paper #438 124 places worse
0.8284 ±0.0013
actual #314 vs paper #438 124 places worse
paper 0.8284 ±0.0013
paper 0.8284 ±0.0013 Δ at pub 0.0194
376
GeoMancer
0.8350 ±0.0023
This paper
439
LGD
0.8281 ±0.0118
This paper
456
Graphormer
actual #456 vs paper #456
0.8262 ±0.0012
actual #456 vs paper #456
paper 0.8262 ±0.0012
paper 0.8262 ±0.0012 Δ at pub 0.0221
516
NAGphormer
0.8213 ±0.0118
This paper
550
GraphSAINT
actual #550 vs paper #550
0.8182 ±0.0022
actual #550 vs paper #550
paper 0.8182 ±0.0022
paper 0.8182 ±0.0022 Δ at pub 0.0052
724
MLP
0.7768
#ModelAccuracy ↑Paper
1
CNA
0.9575 ±0.0058
2
IS-GIB
0.9390 ±0.0187
3
EERM
0.9112 ±0.0145
40
NAGphormer
actual #40 vs paper #519 479 places worse
0.8057 ±0.0072
best reported
actual #40 vs paper #519 479 places worse
paper 0.7140 ±0.0030
paper 0.7140 ±0.0030 Δ at pub 0.0917
44
GCN
0.8033 ±0.0088
350
MLP
0.7289 ±0.0010
378
GeoMancer
0.7260 ±0.0020
This paper
418
LGD
0.7240 ±0.0030
This paper
SOTA performance (not significantly different from the best) Proposed method (this paper) Baseline / comparison (this paper) Global context (other papers) Best at pub — reported result worse than the best known when published (best reported in green) Best at pub — reported value improved over the best known when published