Relational Task Generation Language: A Declarative Specification Framework for Relational Deep Learning

Abstract

Relational Deep Learning (RDL) has become a powerful paradigm for learning from multi-tabular data. However, manually defining RDL prediction tasks is a laborious process that frequently results in data leakage. To address this issue, we introduce Relational Task Generation Language (RTGL) - an open-source declarative language that streamlines RDL task formulation by abstracting away low-level SQL details. We showcase RTGL by reconstructing existing RDL benchmark tasks and uncovering their inconsistencies stemming from manually crafted SQL definitions of RDL prediction targets, thereby underscoring the value of a dedicated declarative language. In addition, we demonstrate the practical utility of RTGL by designing various new tasks with diverse forms and target types. Our experiments confirm the robustness and usability of RTGL, as well as its seamless integration with the existing RDL frameworks, making it widely accessible to the community.