From Features to Structure: Task-Aware Graph Construction for Relational and Tabular Learning with GNNs

Abstract: Tabular and relational data remain the most ubiquitous formats in real-world machine learning applications, spanning domains from finance to healthcare. Although both formats offer structured representations, they pose distinct challenges for modern deep learning methods, which typically assume flat, feature-aligned inputs. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising solution by capturing structural dependencies within and between tables. However, existing GNN-based approaches often rely on rigid, schema-derived graphs -- such as those based on primary-foreign key links -- thereby underutilizing rich, predictive signals in non key attributes. In this work, we introduce auGraph, a unified framework for task-aware graph augmentation that applies to both tabular and relational data. auGraph enhances base graph structures by selectively promoting attributes into nodes, guided by scoring functions that quantify their relevance to the downstream prediction task. This augmentation preserves the original data schema while injecting task-relevant structural signal. Empirically, auGraph outperforms schema-based and heuristic graph construction methods by producing graphs that better support learning for relational and tabular prediction tasks.