  Graph autoencoders (AE) and variational autoencoders (VAE) recently emerged
as powerful node embedding methods. In particular, graph AE and VAE were
successfully leveraged to tackle the challenging link prediction problem,
aiming at figuring out whether some pairs of nodes from a graph are connected
by unobserved edges. However, these models focus on undirected graphs and
therefore ignore the potential direction of the link, which is limiting for
numerous real-life applications. In this paper, we extend the graph AE and VAE
frameworks to address link prediction in directed graphs. We present a new
gravity-inspired decoder scheme that can effectively reconstruct directed
graphs from a node embedding. We empirically evaluate our method on three
different directed link prediction tasks, for which standard graph AE and VAE
perform poorly. We achieve competitive results on three real-world graphs,
outperforming several popular baselines.
