TY - JOUR A1 - Boget, Yoann A1 - Gregorová, Magda A1 - Kalousis, Alexandros T1 - Vector-Quantized Graph Auto-Encoder T2 - CoRR N2 - In this work, we addresses the problem of modeling distributions of graphs. We introduce the Vector-Quantized Graph Auto-Encoder (VQ-GAE), a permutation-equivariant discrete auto-encoder and designed to model the distribution of graphs. By exploiting the permutation-equivariance of graph neural networks (GNNs), our autoencoder circumvents the problem of the ordering of the graph representation. We leverage the capability of GNNs to capture local structures of graphs while employing vector-quantization to prevent the mapping of discrete objects to a continuous latent space. Furthermore, the use of autoregressive models enables us to capture the global structure of graphs via the latent representation. We evaluate our model on standard datasets used for graph generation and observe that it achieves excellent performance on some of the most salient evaluation metrics compared to the state-of-the-art. Y1 - 2023 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fhws/frontdoor/index/index/docId/4951 VL - abs/2306.07735 ER -