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SubscribeGraphInsight: Unlocking Insights in Large Language Models for Graph Structure Understanding
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in processing graphs, they struggle with comprehending graphical structure information through prompts of graph description sequences, especially as the graph size increases. We attribute this challenge to the uneven memory performance of LLMs across different positions in graph description sequences, known as ''positional biases''. To address this, we propose GraphInsight, a novel framework aimed at improving LLMs' comprehension of both macro- and micro-level graphical information. GraphInsight is grounded in two key strategies: 1) placing critical graphical information in positions where LLMs exhibit stronger memory performance, and 2) investigating a lightweight external knowledge base for regions with weaker memory performance, inspired by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Moreover, GraphInsight explores integrating these two strategies into LLM agent processes for composite graph tasks that require multi-step reasoning. Extensive empirical studies on benchmarks with a wide range of evaluation tasks show that GraphInsight significantly outperforms all other graph description methods (e.g., prompting techniques and reordering strategies) in understanding graph structures of varying sizes.
Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs
Large language models (LLMs), while exhibiting exceptional performance, suffer from hallucinations, especially on knowledge-intensive tasks. Existing works propose to augment LLMs with individual text units retrieved from external knowledge corpora to alleviate the issue. However, in many domains, texts are interconnected (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic graph are linked by citations and co-authorships) which form a (text-attributed) graph. The knowledge in such graphs is encoded not only in single texts/nodes but also in their associated connections. To facilitate the research of augmenting LLMs with graphs, we manually construct a Graph Reasoning Benchmark dataset called GRBench, containing 1,740 questions that can be answered with the knowledge from 10 domain graphs. Then, we propose a simple and effective framework called Graph Chain-of-thought (Graph-CoT) to augment LLMs with graphs by encouraging LLMs to reason on the graph iteratively. Each Graph-CoT iteration consists of three sub-steps: LLM reasoning, LLM-graph interaction, and graph execution. We conduct systematic experiments with three LLM backbones on GRBench, where Graph-CoT outperforms the baselines consistently. The code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Graph-CoT.
Talk like a Graph: Encoding Graphs for Large Language Models
Graphs are a powerful tool for representing and analyzing complex relationships in real-world applications such as social networks, recommender systems, and computational finance. Reasoning on graphs is essential for drawing inferences about the relationships between entities in a complex system, and to identify hidden patterns and trends. Despite the remarkable progress in automated reasoning with natural text, reasoning on graphs with large language models (LLMs) remains an understudied problem. In this work, we perform the first comprehensive study of encoding graph-structured data as text for consumption by LLMs. We show that LLM performance on graph reasoning tasks varies on three fundamental levels: (1) the graph encoding method, (2) the nature of the graph task itself, and (3) interestingly, the very structure of the graph considered. These novel results provide valuable insight on strategies for encoding graphs as text. Using these insights we illustrate how the correct choice of encoders can boost performance on graph reasoning tasks inside LLMs by 4.8% to 61.8%, depending on the task.
Attention Mechanisms Perspective: Exploring LLM Processing of Graph-Structured Data
Attention mechanisms are critical to the success of large language models (LLMs), driving significant advancements in multiple fields. However, for graph-structured data, which requires emphasis on topological connections, they fall short compared to message-passing mechanisms on fixed links, such as those employed by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). This raises a question: ``Does attention fail for graphs in natural language settings?'' Motivated by these observations, we embarked on an empirical study from the perspective of attention mechanisms to explore how LLMs process graph-structured data. The goal is to gain deeper insights into the attention behavior of LLMs over graph structures. We uncovered unique phenomena regarding how LLMs apply attention to graph-structured data and analyzed these findings to improve the modeling of such data by LLMs. The primary findings of our research are: 1) While LLMs can recognize graph data and capture text-node interactions, they struggle to model inter-node relationships within graph structures due to inherent architectural constraints. 2) The attention distribution of LLMs across graph nodes does not align with ideal structural patterns, indicating a failure to adapt to graph topology nuances. 3) Neither fully connected attention nor fixed connectivity is optimal; each has specific limitations in its application scenarios. Instead, intermediate-state attention windows improve LLM training performance and seamlessly transition to fully connected windows during inference. Source code: https://github.com/millioniron/LLM_exploration{LLM4Exploration}
Memory Networks
We describe a new class of learning models called memory networks. Memory networks reason with inference components combined with a long-term memory component; they learn how to use these jointly. The long-term memory can be read and written to, with the goal of using it for prediction. We investigate these models in the context of question answering (QA) where the long-term memory effectively acts as a (dynamic) knowledge base, and the output is a textual response. We evaluate them on a large-scale QA task, and a smaller, but more complex, toy task generated from a simulated world. In the latter, we show the reasoning power of such models by chaining multiple supporting sentences to answer questions that require understanding the intension of verbs.
Graph Language Models
While Language Models have become workhorses for NLP, their interplay with textual knowledge graphs (KGs) - structured memories of general or domain knowledge - is actively researched. Current embedding methodologies for such graphs typically either (i) linearize graphs for embedding them using sequential Language Models (LMs), which underutilize structural information, or (ii) use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to preserve graph structure, while GNNs cannot represent textual features as well as a pre-trained LM could. In this work we introduce a novel language model, the Graph Language Model (GLM), that integrates the strengths of both approaches, while mitigating their weaknesses. The GLM parameters are initialized from a pretrained LM, to facilitate nuanced understanding of individual concepts and triplets. Simultaneously, its architectural design incorporates graph biases, thereby promoting effective knowledge distribution within the graph. Empirical evaluations on relation classification tasks on ConceptNet subgraphs reveal that GLM embeddings surpass both LM- and GNN-based baselines in supervised and zero-shot settings.
NT-LLM: A Novel Node Tokenizer for Integrating Graph Structure into Large Language Models
Graphs are a fundamental data structure for representing relationships in real-world scenarios. With the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, there has been growing interest in integrating LLMs for graph learning. However, applying LLMs to graph-related tasks poses significant challenges, as these models are not inherently designed to capture the complex structural information present in graphs. Existing approaches address this challenge through two strategies: the chain of tasks approach, which uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to encode the graph structure so that LLMs are relieved from understanding spatial positions; and Graph-to-Text Conversion, which translates graph structures into semantic text representations that LLMs can process. Despite their progress, these methods often struggle to fully preserve the topological information of graphs or require extensive computational resources, limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we introduce Node Tokenizer for Large Language Models (NT-LLM), a novel framework that efficiently encodes graph structures by selecting key nodes as anchors and representing each node based on its relative distance to these anchors. This position-anchored encoding effectively captures the graph topology, enabling enhanced reasoning capabilities in LLMs over graph data. Additionally, we implement a task-specific tuning procedure to further improve structural understanding within LLMs. Through extensive empirical evaluations, NT-LLM demonstrates significant performance improvements across a variety of graph-related tasks.
Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable prowess in generating contextually coherent responses, yet their fixed context windows pose fundamental challenges for maintaining consistency over prolonged multi-session dialogues. We introduce Mem0, a scalable memory-centric architecture that addresses this issue by dynamically extracting, consolidating, and retrieving salient information from ongoing conversations. Building on this foundation, we further propose an enhanced variant that leverages graph-based memory representations to capture complex relational structures among conversational elements. Through comprehensive evaluations on LOCOMO benchmark, we systematically compare our approaches against six baseline categories: (i) established memory-augmented systems, (ii) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with varying chunk sizes and k-values, (iii) a full-context approach that processes the entire conversation history, (iv) an open-source memory solution, (v) a proprietary model system, and (vi) a dedicated memory management platform. Empirical results show that our methods consistently outperform all existing memory systems across four question categories: single-hop, temporal, multi-hop, and open-domain. Notably, Mem0 achieves 26% relative improvements in the LLM-as-a-Judge metric over OpenAI, while Mem0 with graph memory achieves around 2% higher overall score than the base configuration. Beyond accuracy gains, we also markedly reduce computational overhead compared to full-context method. In particular, Mem0 attains a 91% lower p95 latency and saves more than 90% token cost, offering a compelling balance between advanced reasoning capabilities and practical deployment constraints. Our findings highlight critical role of structured, persistent memory mechanisms for long-term conversational coherence, paving the way for more reliable and efficient LLM-driven AI agents.
Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks; however, they still encounter challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences. This challenge is particularly pronounced in tasks involving multi-step processes, such as logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering, where understanding implicit relationships between entities and leveraging multi-hop connections in the given context are crucial. Graphs, as fundamental data structures, explicitly represent pairwise relationships between entities, thereby offering the potential to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities. External graphs have proven effective in supporting LLMs across multiple tasks. However, in many reasoning tasks, no pre-existing graph structure is provided. Can we structure implicit knowledge derived from context into graphs to assist LLMs in reasoning? In this paper, we propose Reasoning with Graphs (RwG) by first constructing explicit graphs from the context and then leveraging these graphs to enhance LLM reasoning performance on reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving both logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks.
Towards Versatile Graph Learning Approach: from the Perspective of Large Language Models
Graph-structured data are the commonly used and have wide application scenarios in the real world. For these diverse applications, the vast variety of learning tasks, graph domains, and complex graph learning procedures present challenges for human experts when designing versatile graph learning approaches. Facing these challenges, large language models (LLMs) offer a potential solution due to the extensive knowledge and the human-like intelligence. This paper proposes a novel conceptual prototype for designing versatile graph learning methods with LLMs, with a particular focus on the "where" and "how" perspectives. From the "where" perspective, we summarize four key graph learning procedures, including task definition, graph data feature engineering, model selection and optimization, deployment and serving. We then explore the application scenarios of LLMs in these procedures across a wider spectrum. In the "how" perspective, we align the abilities of LLMs with the requirements of each procedure. Finally, we point out the promising directions that could better leverage the strength of LLMs towards versatile graph learning methods.
Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for a variety of tasks with implicit graphical structures, such as planning in robotics, multi-hop question answering or knowledge probing, structured commonsense reasoning, and more. While LLMs have advanced the state-of-the-art on these tasks with structure implications, whether LLMs could explicitly process textual descriptions of graphs and structures, map them to grounded conceptual spaces, and perform structured operations remains underexplored. To this end, we propose NLGraph (Natural Language Graph), a comprehensive benchmark of graph-based problem solving designed in natural language. NLGraph contains 29,370 problems, covering eight graph reasoning tasks with varying complexity from simple tasks such as connectivity and shortest path up to complex problems such as maximum flow and simulating graph neural networks. We evaluate LLMs (GPT-3/4) with various prompting approaches on the NLGraph benchmark and find that 1) language models do demonstrate preliminary graph reasoning abilities, 2) the benefit of advanced prompting and in-context learning diminishes on more complex graph problems, while 3) LLMs are also (un)surprisingly brittle in the face of spurious correlations in graph and problem settings. We then propose Build-a-Graph Prompting and Algorithmic Prompting, two instruction-based approaches to enhance LLMs in solving natural language graph problems. Build-a-Graph and Algorithmic prompting improve the performance of LLMs on NLGraph by 3.07% to 16.85% across multiple tasks and settings, while how to solve the most complicated graph reasoning tasks in our setup with language models remains an open research question. The NLGraph benchmark and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Arthur-Heng/NLGraph.
Can Large Language Models Analyze Graphs like Professionals? A Benchmark, Datasets and Models
The need to analyze graphs is ubiquitous across various fields, from social networks to biological research and recommendation systems. Therefore, enabling the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process graphs is an important step toward more advanced general intelligence. However, current LLM benchmarks on graph analysis require models to directly reason over the prompts describing graph topology, and are thus limited to small graphs with only a few dozens of nodes. In contrast, human experts typically write programs based on popular libraries for task solving, and can thus handle graphs with different scales. To this end, a question naturally arises: can LLMs analyze graphs like professionals? In this paper, we introduce ProGraph, a manually crafted benchmark containing 3 categories of graph tasks. The benchmark expects solutions based on programming instead of directly reasoning over raw inputs. Our findings reveal that the performance of current LLMs is unsatisfactory, with the best model achieving only 36% accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose LLM4Graph datasets, which include crawled documents and auto-generated codes based on 6 widely used graph libraries. By augmenting closed-source LLMs with document retrieval and fine-tuning open-source ones on the codes, we show 11-32% absolute improvements in their accuracies. Our results underscore that the capabilities of LLMs in handling structured data are still under-explored, and show the effectiveness of LLM4Graph in enhancing LLMs' proficiency of graph analysis. The benchmark, datasets and enhanced open-source models are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/ProGraph.
Large Language Models on Graphs: A Comprehensive Survey
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, are creating significant advancements in natural language processing, due to their strong text encoding/decoding ability and newly found emergent capability (e.g., reasoning). While LLMs are mainly designed to process pure texts, there are many real-world scenarios where text data are associated with rich structure information in the form of graphs (e.g., academic networks, and e-commerce networks) or scenarios where graph data are paired with rich textual information (e.g., molecules with descriptions). Besides, although LLMs have shown their pure text-based reasoning ability, it is underexplored whether such ability can be generalized to graph scenarios (i.e., graph-based reasoning). In this paper, we provide a systematic review of scenarios and techniques related to large language models on graphs. We first summarize potential scenarios of adopting LLMs on graphs into three categories, namely pure graphs, text-rich graphs, and text-paired graphs. We then discuss detailed techniques for utilizing LLMs on graphs, including LLM as Predictor, LLM as Encoder, and LLM as Aligner, and compare the advantages and disadvantages of different schools of models. Furthermore, we mention the real-world applications of such methods and summarize open-source codes and benchmark datasets. Finally, we conclude with potential future research directions in this fast-growing field. The related source can be found at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Awesome-Language-Model-on-Graphs.
ICLR: In-Context Learning of Representations
Recent work has demonstrated that semantics specified by pretraining data influence how representations of different concepts are organized in a large language model (LLM). However, given the open-ended nature of LLMs, e.g., their ability to in-context learn, we can ask whether models alter these pretraining semantics to adopt alternative, context-specified ones. Specifically, if we provide in-context exemplars wherein a concept plays a different role than what the pretraining data suggests, do models reorganize their representations in accordance with these novel semantics? To answer this question, we take inspiration from the theory of conceptual role semantics and define a toy "graph tracing" task wherein the nodes of the graph are referenced via concepts seen during training (e.g., apple, bird, etc.) and the connectivity of the graph is defined via some predefined structure (e.g., a square grid). Given exemplars that indicate traces of random walks on the graph, we analyze intermediate representations of the model and find that as the amount of context is scaled, there is a sudden re-organization from pretrained semantic representations to in-context representations aligned with the graph structure. Further, we find that when reference concepts have correlations in their semantics (e.g., Monday, Tuesday, etc.), the context-specified graph structure is still present in the representations, but is unable to dominate the pretrained structure. To explain these results, we analogize our task to energy minimization for a predefined graph topology, providing evidence towards an implicit optimization process to infer context-specified semantics. Overall, our findings indicate scaling context-size can flexibly re-organize model representations, possibly unlocking novel capabilities.
GraphLLM: Boosting Graph Reasoning Ability of Large Language Model
The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has remarkably pushed the boundaries towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), with their exceptional ability on understanding diverse types of information, including but not limited to images and audio. Despite this progress, a critical gap remains in empowering LLMs to proficiently understand and reason on graph data. Recent studies underscore LLMs' underwhelming performance on fundamental graph reasoning tasks. In this paper, we endeavor to unearth the obstacles that impede LLMs in graph reasoning, pinpointing the common practice of converting graphs into natural language descriptions (Graph2Text) as a fundamental bottleneck. To overcome this impediment, we introduce GraphLLM, a pioneering end-to-end approach that synergistically integrates graph learning models with LLMs. This synergy equips LLMs with the ability to proficiently interpret and reason on graph data, harnessing the superior expressive power of graph learning models. Our empirical evaluations across four fundamental graph reasoning tasks validate the effectiveness of GraphLLM. The results exhibit a substantial average accuracy enhancement of 54.44%, alongside a noteworthy context reduction of 96.45% across various graph reasoning tasks.
Graph Pre-training for AMR Parsing and Generation
Abstract meaning representation (AMR) highlights the core semantic information of text in a graph structure. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have advanced tasks of AMR parsing and AMR-to-text generation, respectively. However, PLMs are typically pre-trained on textual data, thus are sub-optimal for modeling structural knowledge. To this end, we investigate graph self-supervised training to improve the structure awareness of PLMs over AMR graphs. In particular, we introduce two graph auto-encoding strategies for graph-to-graph pre-training and four tasks to integrate text and graph information during pre-training. We further design a unified framework to bridge the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning tasks. Experiments on both AMR parsing and AMR-to-text generation show the superiority of our model. To our knowledge, we are the first to consider pre-training on semantic graphs.
From Isolated Conversations to Hierarchical Schemas: Dynamic Tree Memory Representation for LLMs
Recent advancements in large language models have significantly improved their context windows, yet challenges in effective long-term memory management remain. We introduce MemTree, an algorithm that leverages a dynamic, tree-structured memory representation to optimize the organization, retrieval, and integration of information, akin to human cognitive schemas. MemTree organizes memory hierarchically, with each node encapsulating aggregated textual content, corresponding semantic embeddings, and varying abstraction levels across the tree's depths. Our algorithm dynamically adapts this memory structure by computing and comparing semantic embeddings of new and existing information to enrich the model's context-awareness. This approach allows MemTree to handle complex reasoning and extended interactions more effectively than traditional memory augmentation methods, which often rely on flat lookup tables. Evaluations on benchmarks for multi-turn dialogue understanding and document question answering show that MemTree significantly enhances performance in scenarios that demand structured memory management.
Explanation Graph Generation via Pre-trained Language Models: An Empirical Study with Contrastive Learning
Pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models have led to widespread success in many natural language generation tasks. However, there has been relatively less work on analyzing their ability to generate structured outputs such as graphs. Unlike natural language, graphs have distinct structural and semantic properties in the context of a downstream NLP task, e.g., generating a graph that is connected and acyclic can be attributed to its structural constraints, while the semantics of a graph can refer to how meaningfully an edge represents the relation between two node concepts. In this work, we study pre-trained language models that generate explanation graphs in an end-to-end manner and analyze their ability to learn the structural constraints and semantics of such graphs. We first show that with limited supervision, pre-trained language models often generate graphs that either violate these constraints or are semantically incoherent. Since curating large amount of human-annotated graphs is expensive and tedious, we propose simple yet effective ways of graph perturbations via node and edge edit operations that lead to structurally and semantically positive and negative graphs. Next, we leverage these graphs in different contrastive learning models with Max-Margin and InfoNCE losses. Our methods lead to significant improvements in both structural and semantic accuracy of explanation graphs and also generalize to other similar graph generation tasks. Lastly, we show that human errors are the best negatives for contrastive learning and also that automatically generating more such human-like negative graphs can lead to further improvements. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/swarnaHub/ExplagraphGen
The Goldilocks Principle: Reading Children's Books with Explicit Memory Representations
We introduce a new test of how well language models capture meaning in children's books. Unlike standard language modelling benchmarks, it distinguishes the task of predicting syntactic function words from that of predicting lower-frequency words, which carry greater semantic content. We compare a range of state-of-the-art models, each with a different way of encoding what has been previously read. We show that models which store explicit representations of long-term contexts outperform state-of-the-art neural language models at predicting semantic content words, although this advantage is not observed for syntactic function words. Interestingly, we find that the amount of text encoded in a single memory representation is highly influential to the performance: there is a sweet-spot, not too big and not too small, between single words and full sentences that allows the most meaningful information in a text to be effectively retained and recalled. Further, the attention over such window-based memories can be trained effectively through self-supervision. We then assess the generality of this principle by applying it to the CNN QA benchmark, which involves identifying named entities in paraphrased summaries of news articles, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Scene Graph Modification Based on Natural Language Commands
Structured representations like graphs and parse trees play a crucial role in many Natural Language Processing systems. In recent years, the advancements in multi-turn user interfaces necessitate the need for controlling and updating these structured representations given new sources of information. Although there have been many efforts focusing on improving the performance of the parsers that map text to graphs or parse trees, very few have explored the problem of directly manipulating these representations. In this paper, we explore the novel problem of graph modification, where the systems need to learn how to update an existing scene graph given a new user's command. Our novel models based on graph-based sparse transformer and cross attention information fusion outperform previous systems adapted from the machine translation and graph generation literature. We further contribute our large graph modification datasets to the research community to encourage future research for this new problem.
Hierarchical Memory for High-Efficiency Long-Term Reasoning in LLM Agents
Long-term memory is one of the key factors influencing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Model Agents (LLM Agents). Incorporating a memory mechanism that effectively integrates past interactions can significantly enhance decision-making and contextual coherence of LLM Agents. While recent works have made progress in memory storage and retrieval, such as encoding memory into dense vectors for similarity-based search or organizing knowledge in the form of graph, these approaches often fall short in structured memory organization and efficient retrieval. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical Memory (H-MEM) architecture for LLM Agents that organizes and updates memory in a multi-level fashion based on the degree of semantic abstraction. Each memory vector is embedded with a positional index encoding pointing to its semantically related sub-memories in the next layer. During the reasoning phase, an index-based routing mechanism enables efficient, layer-by-layer retrieval without performing exhaustive similarity computations. We evaluate our method on five task settings from the LoCoMo dataset. Experimental results show that our approach consistently outperforms five baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in long-term dialogue scenarios.
The Tensor Brain: Semantic Decoding for Perception and Memory
We analyse perception and memory, using mathematical models for knowledge graphs and tensors, to gain insights into the corresponding functionalities of the human mind. Our discussion is based on the concept of propositional sentences consisting of subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples for expressing elementary facts. SPO sentences are the basis for most natural languages but might also be important for explicit perception and declarative memories, as well as intra-brain communication and the ability to argue and reason. A set of SPO sentences can be described as a knowledge graph, which can be transformed into an adjacency tensor. We introduce tensor models, where concepts have dual representations as indices and associated embeddings, two constructs we believe are essential for the understanding of implicit and explicit perception and memory in the brain. We argue that a biological realization of perception and memory imposes constraints on information processing. In particular, we propose that explicit perception and declarative memories require a semantic decoder, which, in a simple realization, is based on four layers: First, a sensory memory layer, as a buffer for sensory input, second, an index layer representing concepts, third, a memoryless representation layer for the broadcasting of information ---the "blackboard", or the "canvas" of the brain--- and fourth, a working memory layer as a processing center and data buffer. We discuss the operations of the four layers and relate them to the global workspace theory. In a Bayesian brain interpretation, semantic memory defines the prior for observable triple statements. We propose that ---in evolution and during development--- semantic memory, episodic memory, and natural language evolved as emergent properties in agents' process to gain a deeper understanding of sensory information.
AriGraph: Learning Knowledge Graph World Models with Episodic Memory for LLM Agents
Advancements in generative AI have broadened the potential applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the development of autonomous agents. Achieving true autonomy requires accumulating and updating knowledge gained from interactions with the environment and effectively utilizing it. Current LLM-based approaches leverage past experiences using a full history of observations, summarization or retrieval augmentation. However, these unstructured memory representations do not facilitate the reasoning and planning essential for complex decision-making. In our study, we introduce AriGraph, a novel method wherein the agent constructs a memory graph that integrates semantic and episodic memories while exploring the environment. This graph structure facilitates efficient associative retrieval of interconnected concepts, relevant to the agent's current state and goals, thus serving as an effective environmental model that enhances the agent's exploratory and planning capabilities. We demonstrate that our Ariadne LLM agent, equipped with this proposed memory architecture augmented with planning and decision-making, effectively handles complex tasks on a zero-shot basis in the TextWorld environment. Our approach markedly outperforms established methods such as full-history, summarization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation in various tasks, including the cooking challenge from the First TextWorld Problems competition and novel tasks like house cleaning and puzzle Treasure Hunting.
Integrating Graphs with Large Language Models: Methods and Prospects
Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have emerged as frontrunners, showcasing unparalleled prowess in diverse applications, including answering queries, code generation, and more. Parallelly, graph-structured data, an intrinsic data type, is pervasive in real-world scenarios. Merging the capabilities of LLMs with graph-structured data has been a topic of keen interest. This paper bifurcates such integrations into two predominant categories. The first leverages LLMs for graph learning, where LLMs can not only augment existing graph algorithms but also stand as prediction models for various graph tasks. Conversely, the second category underscores the pivotal role of graphs in advancing LLMs. Mirroring human cognition, we solve complex tasks by adopting graphs in either reasoning or collaboration. Integrating with such structures can significantly boost the performance of LLMs in various complicated tasks. We also discuss and propose open questions for integrating LLMs with graph-structured data for the future direction of the field.
Can Graph Learning Improve Planning in LLM-based Agents?
Task planning in language agents is emerging as an important research topic alongside the development of large language models (LLMs). It aims to break down complex user requests in natural language into solvable sub-tasks, thereby fulfilling the original requests. In this context, the sub-tasks can be naturally viewed as a graph, where the nodes represent the sub-tasks, and the edges denote the dependencies among them. Consequently, task planning is a decision-making problem that involves selecting a connected path or subgraph within the corresponding graph and invoking it. In this paper, we explore graph learning-based methods for task planning, a direction that is orthogonal to the prevalent focus on prompt design. Our interest in graph learning stems from a theoretical discovery: the biases of attention and auto-regressive loss impede LLMs' ability to effectively navigate decision-making on graphs, which is adeptly addressed by graph neural networks (GNNs). This theoretical insight led us to integrate GNNs with LLMs to enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GNN-based methods surpass existing solutions even without training, and minimal training can further enhance their performance. The performance gain increases with a larger task graph size.
Convomem Benchmark: Why Your First 150 Conversations Don't Need RAG
We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for conversational memory evaluation containing 75,336 question-answer pairs across diverse categories including user facts, assistant recall, abstention, preferences, temporal changes, and implicit connections. While existing benchmarks have advanced the field, our work addresses fundamental challenges in statistical power, data generation consistency, and evaluation flexibility that limit current memory evaluation frameworks. We examine the relationship between conversational memory and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). While these systems share fundamental architectural patterns--temporal reasoning, implicit extraction, knowledge updates, and graph representations--memory systems have a unique characteristic: they start from zero and grow progressively with each conversation. This characteristic enables naive approaches that would be impractical for traditional RAG. Consistent with recent findings on long context effectiveness, we observe that simple full-context approaches achieve 70-82% accuracy even on our most challenging multi-message evidence cases, while sophisticated RAG-based memory systems like Mem0 achieve only 30-45% when operating on conversation histories under 150 interactions. Our analysis reveals practical transition points: long context excels for the first 30 conversations, remains viable with manageable trade-offs up to 150 conversations, and typically requires hybrid or RAG approaches beyond that point as costs and latencies become prohibitive. These patterns indicate that the small-corpus advantage of conversational memory--where exhaustive search and complete reranking are feasible--deserves dedicated research attention rather than simply applying general RAG solutions to conversation histories.
Assessing Episodic Memory in LLMs with Sequence Order Recall Tasks
Current LLM benchmarks focus on evaluating models' memory of facts and semantic relations, primarily assessing semantic aspects of long-term memory. However, in humans, long-term memory also includes episodic memory, which links memories to their contexts, such as the time and place they occurred. The ability to contextualize memories is crucial for many cognitive tasks and everyday functions. This form of memory has not been evaluated in LLMs with existing benchmarks. To address the gap in evaluating memory in LLMs, we introduce Sequence Order Recall Tasks (SORT), which we adapt from tasks used to study episodic memory in cognitive psychology. SORT requires LLMs to recall the correct order of text segments, and provides a general framework that is both easily extendable and does not require any additional annotations. We present an initial evaluation dataset, Book-SORT, comprising 36k pairs of segments extracted from 9 books recently added to the public domain. Based on a human experiment with 155 participants, we show that humans can recall sequence order based on long-term memory of a book. We find that models can perform the task with high accuracy when relevant text is given in-context during the SORT evaluation. However, when presented with the book text only during training, LLMs' performance on SORT falls short. By allowing to evaluate more aspects of memory, we believe that SORT will aid in the emerging development of memory-augmented models.
On the Structural Memory of LLM Agents
Memory plays a pivotal role in enabling large language model~(LLM)-based agents to engage in complex and long-term interactions, such as question answering (QA) and dialogue systems. While various memory modules have been proposed for these tasks, the impact of different memory structures across tasks remains insufficiently explored. This paper investigates how memory structures and memory retrieval methods affect the performance of LLM-based agents. Specifically, we evaluate four types of memory structures, including chunks, knowledge triples, atomic facts, and summaries, along with mixed memory that combines these components. In addition, we evaluate three widely used memory retrieval methods: single-step retrieval, reranking, and iterative retrieval. Extensive experiments conducted across four tasks and six datasets yield the following key insights: (1) Different memory structures offer distinct advantages, enabling them to be tailored to specific tasks; (2) Mixed memory structures demonstrate remarkable resilience in noisy environments; (3) Iterative retrieval consistently outperforms other methods across various scenarios. Our investigation aims to inspire further research into the design of memory systems for LLM-based agents.
Human-like Episodic Memory for Infinite Context LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, but still struggle with processing extensive contexts, limiting their ability to maintain coherence and accuracy over long sequences. In contrast, the human brain excels at organising and retrieving episodic experiences across vast temporal scales, spanning a lifetime. In this work, we introduce EM-LLM, a novel approach that integrates key aspects of human episodic memory and event cognition into LLMs, enabling them to effectively handle practically infinite context lengths while maintaining computational efficiency. EM-LLM organises sequences of tokens into coherent episodic events using a combination of Bayesian surprise and graph-theoretic boundary refinement in an on-line fashion. When needed, these events are retrieved through a two-stage memory process, combining similarity-based and temporally contiguous retrieval for efficient and human-like access to relevant information. Experiments on the LongBench dataset demonstrate EM-LLM's superior performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art InfLLM model with an overall relative improvement of 4.3% across various tasks, including a 33% improvement on the PassageRetrieval task. Furthermore, our analysis reveals strong correlations between EM-LLM's event segmentation and human-perceived events, suggesting a bridge between this artificial system and its biological counterpart. This work not only advances LLM capabilities in processing extended contexts but also provides a computational framework for exploring human memory mechanisms, opening new avenues for interdisciplinary research in AI and cognitive science.
From Human Memory to AI Memory: A Survey on Memory Mechanisms in the Era of LLMs
Memory is the process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information, allowing humans to retain experiences, knowledge, skills, and facts over time, and serving as the foundation for growth and effective interaction with the world. It plays a crucial role in shaping our identity, making decisions, learning from past experiences, building relationships, and adapting to changes. In the era of large language models (LLMs), memory refers to the ability of an AI system to retain, recall, and use information from past interactions to improve future responses and interactions. Although previous research and reviews have provided detailed descriptions of memory mechanisms, there is still a lack of a systematic review that summarizes and analyzes the relationship between the memory of LLM-driven AI systems and human memory, as well as how we can be inspired by human memory to construct more powerful memory systems. To achieve this, in this paper, we propose a comprehensive survey on the memory of LLM-driven AI systems. In particular, we first conduct a detailed analysis of the categories of human memory and relate them to the memory of AI systems. Second, we systematically organize existing memory-related work and propose a categorization method based on three dimensions (object, form, and time) and eight quadrants. Finally, we illustrate some open problems regarding the memory of current AI systems and outline possible future directions for memory in the era of large language models.
GraphText: Graph Reasoning in Text Space
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained the ability to assimilate human knowledge and facilitate natural language interactions with both humans and other LLMs. However, despite their impressive achievements, LLMs have not made significant advancements in the realm of graph machine learning. This limitation arises because graphs encapsulate distinct relational data, making it challenging to transform them into natural language that LLMs understand. In this paper, we bridge this gap with a novel framework, GraphText, that translates graphs into natural language. GraphText derives a graph-syntax tree for each graph that encapsulates both the node attributes and inter-node relationships. Traversal of the tree yields a graph text sequence, which is then processed by an LLM to treat graph tasks as text generation tasks. Notably, GraphText offers multiple advantages. It introduces training-free graph reasoning: even without training on graph data, GraphText with ChatGPT can achieve on par with, or even surpassing, the performance of supervised-trained graph neural networks through in-context learning (ICL). Furthermore, GraphText paves the way for interactive graph reasoning, allowing both humans and LLMs to communicate with the model seamlessly using natural language. These capabilities underscore the vast, yet-to-be-explored potential of LLMs in the domain of graph machine learning.
Beyond Fact Retrieval: Episodic Memory for RAG with Generative Semantic Workspaces
Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in long-context reasoning: many documents exceed their finite context windows, while performance on texts that do fit degrades with sequence length, necessitating their augmentation with external memory frameworks. Current solutions, which have evolved from retrieval using semantic embeddings to more sophisticated structured knowledge graphs representations for improved sense-making and associativity, are tailored for fact-based retrieval and fail to build the space-time-anchored narrative representations required for tracking entities through episodic events. To bridge this gap, we propose the Generative Semantic Workspace (GSW), a neuro-inspired generative memory framework that builds structured, interpretable representations of evolving situations, enabling LLMs to reason over evolving roles, actions, and spatiotemporal contexts. Our framework comprises an Operator, which maps incoming observations to intermediate semantic structures, and a Reconciler, which integrates these into a persistent workspace that enforces temporal, spatial, and logical coherence. On the Episodic Memory Benchmark (EpBench) huet_episodic_2025 comprising corpora ranging from 100k to 1M tokens in length, GSW outperforms existing RAG based baselines by up to 20\%. Furthermore, GSW is highly efficient, reducing query-time context tokens by 51\% compared to the next most token-efficient baseline, reducing inference time costs considerably. More broadly, GSW offers a concrete blueprint for endowing LLMs with human-like episodic memory, paving the way for more capable agents that can reason over long horizons.
G-Retriever: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering
Given a graph with textual attributes, we enable users to `chat with their graph': that is, to ask questions about the graph using a conversational interface. In response to a user's questions, our method provides textual replies and highlights the relevant parts of the graph. While existing works integrate large language models (LLMs) and graph neural networks (GNNs) in various ways, they mostly focus on either conventional graph tasks (such as node, edge, and graph classification), or on answering simple graph queries on small or synthetic graphs. In contrast, we develop a flexible question-answering framework targeting real-world textual graphs, applicable to multiple applications including scene graph understanding, common sense reasoning, and knowledge graph reasoning. Toward this goal, we first develop a Graph Question Answering (GraphQA) benchmark with data collected from different tasks. Then, we propose our G-Retriever method, introducing the first retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach for general textual graphs, which can be fine-tuned to enhance graph understanding via soft prompting. To resist hallucination and to allow for textual graphs that greatly exceed the LLM's context window size, G-Retriever performs RAG over a graph by formulating this task as a Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree optimization problem. Empirical evaluations show that our method outperforms baselines on textual graph tasks from multiple domains, scales well with larger graph sizes, and mitigates hallucination.~Our codes and datasets are available at: \url{https://github.com/XiaoxinHe/G-Retriever}
`Keep it Together': Enforcing Cohesion in Extractive Summaries by Simulating Human Memory
Extractive summaries are usually presented as lists of sentences with no expected cohesion between them. In this paper, we aim to enforce cohesion whilst controlling for informativeness and redundancy in summaries, in cases where the input exhibits high redundancy. The pipeline controls for redundancy in long inputs as it is consumed, and balances informativeness and cohesion during sentence selection. Our sentence selector simulates human memory to keep track of topics --modeled as lexical chains--, enforcing cohesive ties between noun phrases. Across a variety of domains, our experiments revealed that it is possible to extract highly cohesive summaries that nevertheless read as informative to humans as summaries extracted by only accounting for informativeness or redundancy. The extracted summaries exhibit smooth topic transitions between sentences as signaled by lexical chains, with chains spanning adjacent or near-adjacent sentences.
Aspects of human memory and Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) are huge artificial neural networks which primarily serve to generate text, but also provide a very sophisticated probabilistic model of language use. Since generating a semantically consistent text requires a form of effective memory, we investigate the memory properties of LLMs and find surprising similarities with key characteristics of human memory. We argue that the human-like memory properties of the Large Language Model do not follow automatically from the LLM architecture but are rather learned from the statistics of the training textual data. These results strongly suggest that the biological features of human memory leave an imprint on the way that we structure our textual narratives.
Graph-KV: Breaking Sequence via Injecting Structural Biases into Large Language Models
Modern large language models (LLMs) are inherently auto-regressive, requiring input to be serialized into flat sequences regardless of their structural dependencies. This serialization hinders the model's ability to leverage structural inductive biases, especially in tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reasoning on data with native graph structures, where inter-segment dependencies are crucial. We introduce Graph-KV with the potential to overcome this limitation. Graph-KV leverages the KV-cache of text segments as condensed representations and governs their interaction through structural inductive biases. In this framework, 'target' segments selectively attend only to the KV-caches of their designated 'source' segments, rather than all preceding segments in a serialized sequence. This approach induces a graph-structured block mask, sparsifying attention and enabling a message-passing-like step within the LLM. Furthermore, strategically allocated positional encodings for source and target segments reduce positional bias and context window consumption. We evaluate Graph-KV across three scenarios: (1) seven RAG benchmarks spanning direct inference, multi-hop reasoning, and long-document understanding; (2) Arxiv-QA, a novel academic paper QA task with full-text scientific papers structured as citation ego-graphs; and (3) paper topic classification within a citation network. By effectively reducing positional bias and harnessing structural inductive biases, Graph-KV substantially outperforms baselines, including standard costly sequential encoding, across various settings. Code and the Graph-KV data are publicly available.
Graph-ToolFormer: To Empower LLMs with Graph Reasoning Ability via Prompt Augmented by ChatGPT
In this paper, we aim to develop a large language model (LLM) with the reasoning ability on complex graph data. Currently, LLMs have achieved very impressive performance on various natural language learning tasks, extensions of which have also been applied to study the vision tasks with multi-modal data. However, when it comes to the graph learning tasks, existing LLMs present very serious flaws due to their several inherited weaknesses in performing {multi-step logic reasoning}, {precise mathematical calculation} and {perception about the spatial and temporal factors}. To address such challenges, in this paper, we will investigate the principles, methodologies and algorithms to empower existing LLMs with graph reasoning ability, which will have tremendous impacts on the current research of both LLMs and graph learning. Inspired by the latest ChatGPT and Toolformer models, we propose the Graph-ToolFormer (Graph Reasoning oriented Toolformer) framework to teach LLMs themselves with prompts augmented by ChatGPT to use external graph reasoning API tools. Specifically, we will investigate to teach Graph-ToolFormer to handle various graph data reasoning tasks in this paper, including both (1) very basic graph data loading and graph property reasoning tasks, ranging from simple graph order and size to the graph diameter and periphery, and (2) more advanced reasoning tasks on real-world graph data, such as bibliographic networks, protein molecules, sequential recommender systems, social networks and knowledge graphs.
Self-Exploring Language Models for Explainable Link Forecasting on Temporal Graphs via Reinforcement Learning
Forecasting future links is a central task in temporal graph (TG) reasoning, requiring models to leverage historical interactions to predict upcoming ones. Traditional neural approaches, such as temporal graph neural networks, achieve strong performance but lack explainability and cannot be applied to unseen graphs without retraining. Recent studies have begun to explore using large language models (LLMs) for graph reasoning, but most of them are constrained to static graphs or small synthetic TGs and lack the evaluation of the quality of reasoning traces generated by LLMs. In this work, we present Reasoning-Enhanced Learning for Temporal Graphs (ReaL-TG), a reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes LLMs to perform explainable link forecasting on real-world TGs. ReaL-TG uses outcome-based reward to encourage models to self-explore reasoning strategies from graph structure and to produce explanations that directly justify their predictions. To enable evaluation on LLM-generated reasoning traces, we propose a new evaluation protocol combining ranking metrics with an LLM-as-a-Judge system that assesses both the quality of reasoning and the impact of hallucinations. Experiments with ReaL-TG-4B, obtained by fine-tuning Qwen3-4B under our framework, show that it outperforms much larger frontier LLMs, including GPT-5 mini, on ranking metrics, while producing high-quality explanations confirmed by both the LLM judge and human evaluation.
Evaluating Large Language Models on Graphs: Performance Insights and Comparative Analysis
Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered considerable interest within both academic and industrial. Yet, the application of LLMs to graph data remains under-explored. In this study, we evaluate the capabilities of four LLMs in addressing several analytical problems with graph data. We employ four distinct evaluation metrics: Comprehension, Correctness, Fidelity, and Rectification. Our results show that: 1) LLMs effectively comprehend graph data in natural language and reason with graph topology. 2) GPT models can generate logical and coherent results, outperforming alternatives in correctness. 3) All examined LLMs face challenges in structural reasoning, with techniques like zero-shot chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting showing diminished efficacy. 4) GPT models often produce erroneous answers in multi-answer tasks, raising concerns in fidelity. 5) GPT models exhibit elevated confidence in their outputs, potentially hindering their rectification capacities. Notably, GPT-4 has demonstrated the capacity to rectify responses from GPT-3.5-turbo and its own previous iterations. The code is available at: https://github.com/Ayame1006/LLMtoGraph.
Are Large Language Models In-Context Graph Learners?
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context reasoning capabilities across a wide range of tasks, particularly with unstructured inputs such as language or images. However, LLMs struggle to handle structured data, such as graphs, due to their lack of understanding of non-Euclidean structures. As a result, without additional fine-tuning, their performance significantly lags behind that of graph neural networks (GNNs) in graph learning tasks. In this paper, we show that learning on graph data can be conceptualized as a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process, where specific instances (e.g., nodes or edges) act as queries, and the graph itself serves as the retrieved context. Building on this insight, we propose a series of RAG frameworks to enhance the in-context learning capabilities of LLMs for graph learning tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed RAG frameworks significantly improve LLM performance on graph-based tasks, particularly in scenarios where a pretrained LLM must be used without modification or accessed via an API.
HEMA : A Hippocampus-Inspired Extended Memory Architecture for Long-Context AI Conversations
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with maintaining coherence in extended conversations spanning hundreds of turns, despite performing well within their context windows. This paper introduces HEMA (Hippocampus-Inspired Extended Memory Architecture), a dual-memory system inspired by human cognitive processes. HEMA combines Compact Memory - a continuously updated one-sentence summary preserving global narrative coherence, and Vector Memory - an episodic store of chunk embeddings queried via cosine similarity. When integrated with a 6B-parameter transformer, HEMA maintains coherent dialogues beyond 300 turns while keeping prompt length under 3,500 tokens. Experimental results show substantial improvements: factual recall accuracy increases from 41% to 87%, and human-rated coherence improves from 2.7 to 4.3 on a 5-point scale. With 10K indexed chunks, Vector Memory achieves P@5 >= 0.80 and R@50 >= 0.74, doubling the area under the precision-recall curve compared to summarization-only approaches. Ablation studies reveal two key insights: semantic forgetting through age-weighted pruning reduces retrieval latency by 34% with minimal recall loss, and a two-level summary hierarchy prevents cascade errors in ultra-long conversations exceeding 1,000 turns. HEMA demonstrates that combining verbatim recall with semantic continuity provides a practical solution for privacy-aware conversational AI capable of month-long dialogues without model retraining.
Memory Retrieval and Consolidation in Large Language Models through Function Tokens
The remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) stems from their ability to consolidate vast amounts of knowledge into the memory during pre-training and to retrieve it from the memory during inference, enabling advanced capabilities such as knowledge memorization, instruction-following and reasoning. However, the mechanisms of memory retrieval and consolidation in LLMs remain poorly understood. In this paper, we propose the function token hypothesis to explain the workings of LLMs: During inference, function tokens activate the most predictive features from context and govern next token prediction (memory retrieval). During pre-training, predicting the next tokens (usually content tokens) that follow function tokens increases the number of learned features of LLMs and updates the model parameters (memory consolidation). Function tokens here roughly correspond to function words in linguistics, including punctuation marks, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions, in contrast to content tokens. We provide extensive experimental evidence supporting this hypothesis. Using bipartite graph analysis, we show that a small number of function tokens activate the majority of features. Case studies further reveal how function tokens activate the most predictive features from context to direct next token prediction. We also find that during pre-training, the training loss is dominated by predicting the next content tokens following function tokens, which forces the function tokens to select the most predictive features from context.
One for All: Towards Training One Graph Model for All Classification Tasks
Designing a single model to address multiple tasks has been a long-standing objective in artificial intelligence. Recently, large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in solving different tasks within the language domain. However, a unified model for various graph tasks remains underexplored, primarily due to the challenges unique to the graph learning domain. First, graph data from different areas carry distinct attributes and follow different distributions. Such discrepancy makes it hard to represent graphs in a single representation space. Second, tasks on graphs diversify into node, link, and graph tasks, requiring distinct embedding strategies. Finally, an appropriate graph prompting paradigm for in-context learning is unclear. We propose One for All (OFA), the first general framework that can use a single graph model to address the above challenges. Specifically, OFA proposes text-attributed graphs to unify different graph data by describing nodes and edges with natural language and uses language models to encode the diverse and possibly cross-domain text attributes to feature vectors in the same embedding space. Furthermore, OFA introduces the concept of nodes-of-interest to standardize different tasks with a single task representation. For in-context learning on graphs, OFA introduces a novel graph prompting paradigm that appends prompting substructures to the input graph, which enables it to address varied tasks without fine-tuning. We train the OFA model using graph data from multiple domains (including citation networks, molecular graphs, knowledge graphs, etc.) simultaneously and evaluate its ability in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot learning scenarios. OFA performs well across different tasks, making it the first general-purpose across-domains classification model on graphs.
Barack's Wife Hillary: Using Knowledge-Graphs for Fact-Aware Language Modeling
Modeling human language requires the ability to not only generate fluent text but also encode factual knowledge. However, traditional language models are only capable of remembering facts seen at training time, and often have difficulty recalling them. To address this, we introduce the knowledge graph language model (KGLM), a neural language model with mechanisms for selecting and copying facts from a knowledge graph that are relevant to the context. These mechanisms enable the model to render information it has never seen before, as well as generate out-of-vocabulary tokens. We also introduce the Linked WikiText-2 dataset, a corpus of annotated text aligned to the Wikidata knowledge graph whose contents (roughly) match the popular WikiText-2 benchmark. In experiments, we demonstrate that the KGLM achieves significantly better performance than a strong baseline language model. We additionally compare different language model's ability to complete sentences requiring factual knowledge, showing that the KGLM outperforms even very large language models in generating facts.
Relational recurrent neural networks
Memory-based neural networks model temporal data by leveraging an ability to remember information for long periods. It is unclear, however, whether they also have an ability to perform complex relational reasoning with the information they remember. Here, we first confirm our intuitions that standard memory architectures may struggle at tasks that heavily involve an understanding of the ways in which entities are connected -- i.e., tasks involving relational reasoning. We then improve upon these deficits by using a new memory module -- a Relational Memory Core (RMC) -- which employs multi-head dot product attention to allow memories to interact. Finally, we test the RMC on a suite of tasks that may profit from more capable relational reasoning across sequential information, and show large gains in RL domains (e.g. Mini PacMan), program evaluation, and language modeling, achieving state-of-the-art results on the WikiText-103, Project Gutenberg, and GigaWord datasets.
G1: Teaching LLMs to Reason on Graphs with Reinforcement Learning
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress, their proficiency in graph-related tasks remains notably limited, hindering the development of truly general-purpose models. Previous attempts, including pretraining graph foundation models or employing supervised fine-tuning, often face challenges such as the scarcity of large-scale, universally represented graph data. We introduce G1, a simple yet effective approach demonstrating that Reinforcement Learning (RL) on synthetic graph-theoretic tasks can significantly scale LLMs' graph reasoning abilities. To enable RL training, we curate Erd\~os, the largest graph reasoning dataset to date comprising 50 diverse graph-theoretic tasks of varying difficulty levels, 100k training data and 5k test data, all drived from real-world graphs. With RL on Erd\~os, G1 obtains substantial improvements in graph reasoning, where our finetuned 3B model even outperforms Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct (24x size). RL-trained models also show strong zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks, domains, and graph encoding schemes, including other graph-theoretic benchmarks as well as real-world node classification and link prediction tasks, without compromising general reasoning abilities. Our findings offer an efficient, scalable path for building strong graph reasoners by finetuning LLMs with RL on graph-theoretic tasks, which combines the strengths of pretrained LLM capabilities with abundant, automatically generated synthetic data, suggesting that LLMs possess graph understanding abilities that RL can elicit successfully.
LiCoMemory: Lightweight and Cognitive Agentic Memory for Efficient Long-Term Reasoning
Large Language Model (LLM) agents exhibit remarkable conversational and reasoning capabilities but remain constrained by limited context windows and the lack of persistent memory. Recent efforts address these limitations via external memory architectures, often employing graph-based representations, yet most adopt flat, entangled structures that intertwine semantics with topology, leading to redundant representations, unstructured retrieval, and degraded efficiency and accuracy. To resolve these issues, we propose LiCoMemory, an end-to-end agentic memory framework for real-time updating and retrieval, which introduces CogniGraph, a lightweight hierarchical graph that utilizes entities and relations as semantic indexing layers, and employs temporal and hierarchy-aware search with integrated reranking for adaptive and coherent knowledge retrieval. Experiments on long-term dialogue benchmarks, LoCoMo and LongMemEval, show that LiCoMemory not only outperforms established baselines in temporal reasoning, multi-session consistency, and retrieval efficiency, but also notably reduces update latency. Our official code and data are available at https://github.com/EverM0re/LiCoMemory.
Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models
We introduce Graph of Thoughts (GoT): a framework that advances prompting capabilities in large language models (LLMs) beyond those offered by paradigms such as Chain-of-Thought or Tree of Thoughts (ToT). The key idea and primary advantage of GoT is the ability to model the information generated by an LLM as an arbitrary graph, where units of information ("LLM thoughts") are vertices, and edges correspond to dependencies between these vertices. This approach enables combining arbitrary LLM thoughts into synergistic outcomes, distilling the essence of whole networks of thoughts, or enhancing thoughts using feedback loops. We illustrate that GoT offers advantages over state of the art on different tasks, for example increasing the quality of sorting by 62% over ToT, while simultaneously reducing costs by >31%. We ensure that GoT is extensible with new thought transformations and thus can be used to spearhead new prompting schemes. This work brings the LLM reasoning closer to human thinking or brain mechanisms such as recurrence, both of which form complex networks.
Beyond a Million Tokens: Benchmarking and Enhancing Long-Term Memory in LLMs
Evaluating the abilities of large language models (LLMs) for tasks that require long-term memory and thus long-context reasoning, for example in conversational settings, is hampered by the existing benchmarks, which often lack narrative coherence, cover narrow domains, and only test simple recall-oriented tasks. This paper introduces a comprehensive solution to these challenges. First, we present a novel framework for automatically generating long (up to 10M tokens), coherent, and topically diverse conversations, accompanied by probing questions targeting a wide range of memory abilities. From this, we construct BEAM, a new benchmark comprising 100 conversations and 2,000 validated questions. Second, to enhance model performance, we propose LIGHT-a framework inspired by human cognition that equips LLMs with three complementary memory systems: a long-term episodic memory, a short-term working memory, and a scratchpad for accumulating salient facts. Our experiments on BEAM reveal that even LLMs with 1M token context windows (with and without retrieval-augmentation) struggle as dialogues lengthen. In contrast, LIGHT consistently improves performance across various models, achieving an average improvement of 3.5%-12.69% over the strongest baselines, depending on the backbone LLM. An ablation study further confirms the contribution of each memory component.
Propagate-Selector: Detecting Supporting Sentences for Question Answering via Graph Neural Networks
In this study, we propose a novel graph neural network called propagate-selector (PS), which propagates information over sentences to understand information that cannot be inferred when considering sentences in isolation. First, we design a graph structure in which each node represents an individual sentence, and some pairs of nodes are selectively connected based on the text structure. Then, we develop an iterative attentive aggregation and a skip-combine method in which a node interacts with its neighborhood nodes to accumulate the necessary information. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, we conduct experiments with the standard HotpotQA dataset. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which obtains the best performances, compared to the widely used answer-selection models that do not consider the intersentential relationship.
HOT: Higher-Order Dynamic Graph Representation Learning with Efficient Transformers
Many graph representation learning (GRL) problems are dynamic, with millions of edges added or removed per second. A fundamental workload in this setting is dynamic link prediction: using a history of graph updates to predict whether a given pair of vertices will become connected. Recent schemes for link prediction in such dynamic settings employ Transformers, modeling individual graph updates as single tokens. In this work, we propose HOT: a model that enhances this line of works by harnessing higher-order (HO) graph structures; specifically, k-hop neighbors and more general subgraphs containing a given pair of vertices. Harnessing such HO structures by encoding them into the attention matrix of the underlying Transformer results in higher accuracy of link prediction outcomes, but at the expense of increased memory pressure. To alleviate this, we resort to a recent class of schemes that impose hierarchy on the attention matrix, significantly reducing memory footprint. The final design offers a sweetspot between high accuracy and low memory utilization. HOT outperforms other dynamic GRL schemes, for example achieving 9%, 7%, and 15% higher accuracy than - respectively - DyGFormer, TGN, and GraphMixer, for the MOOC dataset. Our design can be seamlessly extended towards other dynamic GRL workloads.
GraphextQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models
While multi-modal models have successfully integrated information from image, video, and audio modalities, integrating graph modality into large language models (LLMs) remains unexplored. This discrepancy largely stems from the inherent divergence between structured graph data and unstructured text data. Incorporating graph knowledge provides a reliable source of information, enabling potential solutions to address issues in text generation, e.g., hallucination, and lack of domain knowledge. To evaluate the integration of graph knowledge into language models, a dedicated dataset is needed. However, there is currently no benchmark dataset specifically designed for multimodal graph-language models. To address this gap, we propose GraphextQA, a question answering dataset with paired subgraphs, retrieved from Wikidata, to facilitate the evaluation and future development of graph-language models. Additionally, we introduce a baseline model called CrossGNN, which conditions answer generation on the paired graphs by cross-attending question-aware graph features at decoding. The proposed dataset is designed to evaluate graph-language models' ability to understand graphs and make use of it for answer generation. We perform experiments with language-only models and the proposed graph-language model to validate the usefulness of the paired graphs and to demonstrate the difficulty of the task.
ChatDB: Augmenting LLMs with Databases as Their Symbolic Memory
Large language models (LLMs) with memory are computationally universal. However, mainstream LLMs are not taking full advantage of memory, and the designs are heavily influenced by biological brains. Due to their approximate nature and proneness to the accumulation of errors, conventional neural memory mechanisms cannot support LLMs to simulate complex reasoning. In this paper, we seek inspiration from modern computer architectures to augment LLMs with symbolic memory for complex multi-hop reasoning. Such a symbolic memory framework is instantiated as an LLM and a set of SQL databases, where the LLM generates SQL instructions to manipulate the SQL databases. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed memory framework on a synthetic dataset requiring complex reasoning. The project website is available at https://chatdatabase.github.io/ .
Filter-then-Generate: Large Language Models with Structure-Text Adapter for Knowledge Graph Completion
Large Language Models (LLMs) present massive inherent knowledge and superior semantic comprehension capability, which have revolutionized various tasks in natural language processing. Despite their success, a critical gap remains in enabling LLMs to perform knowledge graph completion (KGC). Empirical evidence suggests that LLMs consistently perform worse than conventional KGC approaches, even through sophisticated prompt design or tailored instruction-tuning. Fundamentally, applying LLMs on KGC introduces several critical challenges, including a vast set of entity candidates, hallucination issue of LLMs, and under-exploitation of the graph structure. To address these challenges, we propose a novel instruction-tuning-based method, namely FtG. Specifically, we present a filter-then-generate paradigm and formulate the KGC task into a multiple-choice question format. In this way, we can harness the capability of LLMs while mitigating the issue casused by hallucinations. Moreover, we devise a flexible ego-graph serialization prompt and employ a structure-text adapter to couple structure and text information in a contextualized manner. Experimental results demonstrate that FtG achieves substantial performance gain compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The instruction dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LB0828/FtG.
Unveiling Factual Recall Behaviors of Large Language Models through Knowledge Neurons
In this paper, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) actively recall or retrieve their internal repositories of factual knowledge when faced with reasoning tasks. Through an analysis of LLMs' internal factual recall at each reasoning step via Knowledge Neurons, we reveal that LLMs fail to harness the critical factual associations under certain circumstances. Instead, they tend to opt for alternative, shortcut-like pathways to answer reasoning questions. By manually manipulating the recall process of parametric knowledge in LLMs, we demonstrate that enhancing this recall process directly improves reasoning performance whereas suppressing it leads to notable degradation. Furthermore, we assess the effect of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a powerful technique for addressing complex reasoning tasks. Our findings indicate that CoT can intensify the recall of factual knowledge by encouraging LLMs to engage in orderly and reliable reasoning. Furthermore, we explored how contextual conflicts affect the retrieval of facts during the reasoning process to gain a comprehensive understanding of the factual recall behaviors of LLMs. Code and data will be available soon.
Joint Embeddings for Graph Instruction Tuning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in text understanding and have become an essential tool for building smart assistants. Originally focusing on text, they have been enhanced with multimodal capabilities in recent works that successfully built visual instruction following assistants. As far as the graph modality goes, however, no such assistants have yet been developed. Graph structures are complex in that they represent relation between different features and are permutation invariant. Moreover, representing them in purely textual form does not always lead to good LLM performance even for finetuned models. As a result, there is a need to develop a new method to integrate graphs in LLMs for general graph understanding. This work explores the integration of the graph modality in LLM for general graph instruction following tasks. It aims at producing a deep learning model that enhances an underlying LLM with graph embeddings and trains it to understand them and to produce, given an instruction, an answer grounded in the graph representation. The approach performs significantly better than a graph to text approach and remains consistent even for larger graphs.
Graph-R1: Incentivizing the Zero-Shot Graph Learning Capability in LLMs via Explicit Reasoning
Generalizing to unseen graph tasks without task-pecific supervision remains challenging. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited by fixed label spaces, while Large Language Models (LLMs) lack structural inductive biases. Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) provide a zero-shot alternative via explicit, long chain-of-thought reasoning. Inspired by this, we propose a GNN-free approach that reformulates graph tasks--node classification, link prediction, and graph classification--as textual reasoning problems solved by LRMs. We introduce the first datasets with detailed reasoning traces for these tasks and develop Graph-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that leverages task-specific rethink templates to guide reasoning over linearized graphs. Experiments demonstrate that Graph-R1 outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in zero-shot settings, producing interpretable and effective predictions. Our work highlights the promise of explicit reasoning for graph learning and provides new resources for future research.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Node Generation in Few-Shot Learning on Text-Attributed Graphs
Text-attributed graphs have recently garnered significant attention due to their wide range of applications in web domains. Existing methodologies employ word embedding models for acquiring text representations as node features, which are subsequently fed into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for training. Recently, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced their powerful capabilities in information retrieval and text generation, which can greatly enhance the text attributes of graph data. Furthermore, the acquisition and labeling of extensive datasets are both costly and time-consuming endeavors. Consequently, few-shot learning has emerged as a crucial problem in the context of graph learning tasks. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose a lightweight paradigm called LLM4NG, which adopts a plug-and-play approach to empower text-attributed graphs through node generation using LLMs. Specifically, we utilize LLMs to extract semantic information from the labels and generate samples that belong to these categories as exemplars. Subsequently, we employ an edge predictor to capture the structural information inherent in the raw dataset and integrate the newly generated samples into the original graph. This approach harnesses LLMs for enhancing class-level information and seamlessly introduces labeled nodes and edges without modifying the raw dataset, thereby facilitating the node classification task in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed paradigm, particularly in low-shot scenarios. For instance, in the 1-shot setting of the ogbn-arxiv dataset, LLM4NG achieves a 76% improvement over the baseline model.
Cognitive Memory in Large Language Models
This paper examines memory mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs), emphasizing their importance for context-rich responses, reduced hallucinations, and improved efficiency. It categorizes memory into sensory, short-term, and long-term, with sensory memory corresponding to input prompts, short-term memory processing immediate context, and long-term memory implemented via external databases or structures. The text-based memory section covers acquisition (selection and summarization), management (updating, accessing, storing, and resolving conflicts), and utilization (full-text search, SQL queries, semantic search). The KV cache-based memory section discusses selection methods (regularity-based summarization, score-based approaches, special token embeddings) and compression techniques (low-rank compression, KV merging, multimodal compression), along with management strategies like offloading and shared attention mechanisms. Parameter-based memory methods (LoRA, TTT, MoE) transform memories into model parameters to enhance efficiency, while hidden-state-based memory approaches (chunk mechanisms, recurrent transformers, Mamba model) improve long-text processing by combining RNN hidden states with current methods. Overall, the paper offers a comprehensive analysis of LLM memory mechanisms, highlighting their significance and future research directions.
Linking Theories and Methods in Cognitive Sciences via Joint Embedding of the Scientific Literature: The Example of Cognitive Control
Traditionally, theory and practice of Cognitive Control are linked via literature reviews by human domain experts. This approach, however, is inadequate to track the ever-growing literature. It may also be biased, and yield redundancies and confusion. Here we present an alternative approach. We performed automated text analyses on a large body of scientific texts to create a joint representation of tasks and constructs. More specifically, 385,705 scientific abstracts were first mapped into an embedding space using a transformers-based language model. Document embeddings were then used to identify a task-construct graph embedding that grounds constructs on tasks and supports nuanced meaning of the constructs by taking advantage of constrained random walks in the graph. This joint task-construct graph embedding, can be queried to generate task batteries targeting specific constructs, may reveal knowledge gaps in the literature, and inspire new tasks and novel hypotheses.
Harnessing Explanations: LLM-to-LM Interpreter for Enhanced Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning
Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) has become a critical research problem in recent years. A typical example of a TAG is a paper citation graph, where the text of each paper serves as node attributes. Initial graph neural network (GNN) pipelines handled these text attributes by transforming them into shallow or hand-crafted features, such as skip-gram or bag-of-words features. Recent efforts have focused on enhancing these pipelines with language models (LMs), which typically demand intricate designs and substantial computational resources. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs) such as GPT or Llama2, which demonstrate an ability to reason and to utilize general knowledge, there is a growing need for techniques which combine the textual modelling abilities of LLMs with the structural learning capabilities of GNNs. Hence, in this work, we focus on leveraging LLMs to capture textual information as features, which can be used to boost GNN performance on downstream tasks. A key innovation is our use of explanations as features: we prompt an LLM to perform zero-shot classification, request textual explanations for its decision-making process, and design an LLM-to-LM interpreter to translate these explanations into informative features for downstream GNNs. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on well-established TAG datasets, including Cora, PubMed, ogbn-arxiv, as well as our newly introduced dataset, tape-arxiv23. Furthermore, our method significantly speeds up training, achieving a 2.88 times improvement over the closest baseline on ogbn-arxiv. Lastly, we believe the versatility of the proposed method extends beyond TAGs and holds the potential to enhance other tasks involving graph-text data. Our codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/XiaoxinHe/TAPE.
GraphReader: Building Graph-based Agent to Enhance Long-Context Abilities of Large Language Models
Long-context capabilities are essential for large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex and long-input tasks. Despite numerous efforts made to optimize LLMs for long contexts, challenges persist in robustly processing long inputs. In this paper, we introduce GraphReader, a graph-based agent system designed to handle long texts by structuring them into a graph and employing an agent to explore this graph autonomously. Upon receiving a question, the agent first undertakes a step-by-step analysis and devises a rational plan. It then invokes a set of predefined functions to read node content and neighbors, facilitating a coarse-to-fine exploration of the graph. Throughout the exploration, the agent continuously records new insights and reflects on current circumstances to optimize the process until it has gathered sufficient information to generate an answer. Experimental results on the LV-Eval dataset reveal that GraphReader, using a 4k context window, consistently outperforms GPT-4-128k across context lengths from 16k to 256k by a large margin. Additionally, our approach demonstrates superior performance on four challenging single-hop and multi-hop benchmarks.
Memorizing Transformers
Language models typically need to be trained or finetuned in order to acquire new knowledge, which involves updating their weights. We instead envision language models that can simply read and memorize new data at inference time, thus acquiring new knowledge immediately. In this work, we extend language models with the ability to memorize the internal representations of past inputs. We demonstrate that an approximate kNN lookup into a non-differentiable memory of recent (key, value) pairs improves language modeling across various benchmarks and tasks, including generic webtext (C4), math papers (arXiv), books (PG-19), code (Github), as well as formal theorems (Isabelle). We show that the performance steadily improves when we increase the size of memory up to 262K tokens. On benchmarks including code and mathematics, we find that the model is capable of making use of newly defined functions and theorems during test time.
Can Large Language Models Recall Reference Location Like Humans?
When completing knowledge-intensive tasks, humans sometimes need not just an answer but also a corresponding reference passage for auxiliary reading. Previous methods required obtaining pre-segmented article chunks through additional retrieval models. This paper explores leveraging the parameterized knowledge stored during the pre-training phase of large language models (LLMs) to independently recall reference passage from any starting position. We propose a two-stage framework that simulates the scenario of humans recalling easily forgotten references. Initially, the LLM is prompted to recall document title identifiers to obtain a coarse-grained document set. Then, based on the acquired coarse-grained document set, it recalls fine-grained passage. In the two-stage recall process, we use constrained decoding to ensure that content outside of the stored documents is not generated. To increase speed, we only recall a short prefix in the second stage, then locate its position to retrieve a complete passage. Experiments on KILT knowledge-sensitive tasks have verified that LLMs can independently recall reference passage location in various task forms, and the obtained reference significantly assist downstream tasks.
R^2-CoD: Understanding Text-Graph Complementarity in Relational Reasoning via Knowledge Co-Distillation
Relational reasoning lies at the core of many NLP tasks, drawing on complementary signals from text and graphs. While prior research has investigated how to leverage this dual complementarity, a detailed and systematic understanding of text-graph interplay and its effect on hybrid models remains underexplored. We take an analysis-driven approach to investigate text-graph representation complementarity via a unified architecture that supports knowledge co-distillation (CoD). We explore five tasks involving relational reasoning that differ in how text and graph structures encode the information needed to solve that task. By tracking how these dual representations evolve during training, we uncover interpretable patterns of alignment and divergence, and provide insights into when and why their integration is beneficial.
Memory-based Language Models: An Efficient, Explainable, and Eco-friendly Approach to Large Language Modeling
We present memory-based language modeling as an efficient, eco-friendly alternative to deep neural network-based language modeling. It offers log-linearly scalable next-token prediction performance and strong memorization capabilities. Implementing fast approximations of k-nearest neighbor classification, memory-based language modeling leaves a relatively small ecological footprint both in training and in inference mode, as it relies fully on CPUs and attains low token latencies. Its internal workings are simple and fully transparent. We compare our implementation of memory-based language modeling, OLIFANT, with GPT-2 and GPT-Neo on next-token prediction accuracy, estimated emissions and speeds, and offer some deeper analyses of the model.
Graph Parsing Networks
Graph pooling compresses graph information into a compact representation. State-of-the-art graph pooling methods follow a hierarchical approach, which reduces the graph size step-by-step. These methods must balance memory efficiency with preserving node information, depending on whether they use node dropping or node clustering. Additionally, fixed pooling ratios or numbers of pooling layers are predefined for all graphs, which prevents personalized pooling structures from being captured for each individual graph. In this work, inspired by bottom-up grammar induction, we propose an efficient graph parsing algorithm to infer the pooling structure, which then drives graph pooling. The resulting Graph Parsing Network (GPN) adaptively learns personalized pooling structure for each individual graph. GPN benefits from the discrete assignments generated by the graph parsing algorithm, allowing good memory efficiency while preserving node information intact. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that GPN outperforms state-of-the-art graph pooling methods in graph classification tasks while being able to achieve competitive performance in node classification tasks. We also conduct a graph reconstruction task to show GPN's ability to preserve node information and measure both memory and time efficiency through relevant tests.
Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations
Remembering important information from the past and continuing to talk about it in the present are crucial in long-term conversations. However, previous literature does not deal with cases where the memorized information is outdated, which may cause confusion in later conversations. To address this issue, we present a novel task and a corresponding dataset of memory management in long-term conversations, in which bots keep track of and bring up the latest information about users while conversing through multiple sessions. In order to support more precise and interpretable memory, we represent memory as unstructured text descriptions of key information and propose a new mechanism of memory management that selectively eliminates invalidated or redundant information. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the baselines that leave the stored memory unchanged in terms of engagingness and humanness, with larger performance gap especially in the later sessions.
GraphWiz: An Instruction-Following Language Model for Graph Problems
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success across several fields, but their proficiency in understanding and resolving complex graph problems is less explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce GraphInstruct, a novel and comprehensive instruction-tuning dataset designed to equip language models with the ability to tackle a broad spectrum of graph problems using explicit reasoning paths. Utilizing GraphInstruct, we build GraphWiz, an open-source language model capable of resolving various graph problem types while generating clear reasoning processes. To enhance the model's capability and reliability, we incorporate the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework into the graph problem-solving context. The enhanced model, GraphWiz-DPO, achieves an average accuracy of 65% across nine tasks with different complexity levels, surpassing GPT-4 which has an average accuracy of 43.8%. Moreover, our research delves into the delicate balance between training data volume and model performance, highlighting the potential for overfitting with increased data. We also explore the transferability of the model's reasoning ability across different graph tasks, indicating the model's adaptability and practical application potential. Our investigation offers a new blueprint and valuable insights for developing LLMs specialized in graph reasoning and problem-solving.
Representing Syntax and Composition with Geometric Transformations
The exploitation of syntactic graphs (SyGs) as a word's context has been shown to be beneficial for distributional semantic models (DSMs), both at the level of individual word representations and in deriving phrasal representations via composition. However, notwithstanding the potential performance benefit, the syntactically-aware DSMs proposed to date have huge numbers of parameters (compared to conventional DSMs) and suffer from data sparsity. Furthermore, the encoding of the SyG links (i.e., the syntactic relations) has been largely limited to linear maps. The knowledge graphs' literature, on the other hand, has proposed light-weight models employing different geometric transformations (GTs) to encode edges in a knowledge graph (KG). Our work explores the possibility of adopting this family of models to encode SyGs. Furthermore, we investigate which GT better encodes syntactic relations, so that these representations can be used to enhance phrase-level composition via syntactic contextualisation.
Localizing Paragraph Memorization in Language Models
Can we localize the weights and mechanisms used by a language model to memorize and recite entire paragraphs of its training data? In this paper, we show that while memorization is spread across multiple layers and model components, gradients of memorized paragraphs have a distinguishable spatial pattern, being larger in lower model layers than gradients of non-memorized examples. Moreover, the memorized examples can be unlearned by fine-tuning only the high-gradient weights. We localize a low-layer attention head that appears to be especially involved in paragraph memorization. This head is predominantly focusing its attention on distinctive, rare tokens that are least frequent in a corpus-level unigram distribution. Next, we study how localized memorization is across the tokens in the prefix by perturbing tokens and measuring the caused change in the decoding. A few distinctive tokens early in a prefix can often corrupt the entire continuation. Overall, memorized continuations are not only harder to unlearn, but also to corrupt than non-memorized ones.
Context-Efficient Retrieval with Factual Decomposition
There has recently been considerable interest in incorporating information retrieval into large language models (LLMs). Retrieval from a dynamically expanding external corpus of text allows a model to incorporate current events and can be viewed as a form of episodic memory. Here we demonstrate that pre-processing the external corpus into semi-structured ''atomic facts'' makes retrieval more efficient. More specifically, we demonstrate that our particular form of atomic facts improves performance on various question answering tasks when the amount of retrieved text is limited. Limiting the amount of retrieval reduces the size of the context and improves inference efficiency.
Large Language Models Meet Graph Neural Networks: A Perspective of Graph Mining
Graph mining is an important area in data mining and machine learning that involves extracting valuable information from graph-structured data. In recent years, significant progress has been made in this field through the development of graph neural networks (GNNs). However, GNNs are still deficient in generalizing to diverse graph data. Aiming to this issue, Large Language Models (LLMs) could provide new solutions for graph mining tasks with their superior semantic understanding. In this review, we systematically review the combination and application techniques of LLMs and GNNs and present a novel taxonomy for research in this interdisciplinary field, which involves three main categories: GNN-driving-LLM, LLM-driving-GNN, and GNN-LLM-co-driving. Within this framework, we reveal the capabilities of LLMs in enhancing graph feature extraction as well as improving the effectiveness of downstream tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and community detection. Although LLMs have demonstrated their great potential in handling graph-structured data, their high computational requirements and complexity remain challenges. Future research needs to continue to explore how to efficiently fuse LLMs and GNNs to achieve more powerful graph learning and reasoning capabilities and provide new impetus for the development of graph mining techniques.
LexRank: Graph-based Lexical Centrality as Salience in Text Summarization
We introduce a stochastic graph-based method for computing relative importance of textual units for Natural Language Processing. We test the technique on the problem of Text Summarization (TS). Extractive TS relies on the concept of sentence salience to identify the most important sentences in a document or set of documents. Salience is typically defined in terms of the presence of particular important words or in terms of similarity to a centroid pseudo-sentence. We consider a new approach, LexRank, for computing sentence importance based on the concept of eigenvector centrality in a graph representation of sentences. In this model, a connectivity matrix based on intra-sentence cosine similarity is used as the adjacency matrix of the graph representation of sentences. Our system, based on LexRank ranked in first place in more than one task in the recent DUC 2004 evaluation. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of our approach and apply it to a larger data set including data from earlier DUC evaluations. We discuss several methods to compute centrality using the similarity graph. The results show that degree-based methods (including LexRank) outperform both centroid-based methods and other systems participating in DUC in most of the cases. Furthermore, the LexRank with threshold method outperforms the other degree-based techniques including continuous LexRank. We also show that our approach is quite insensitive to the noise in the data that may result from an imperfect topical clustering of documents.
Memory^3: Language Modeling with Explicit Memory
The training and inference of large language models (LLMs) are together a costly process that transports knowledge from raw data to meaningful computation. Inspired by the memory hierarchy of the human brain, we reduce this cost by equipping LLMs with explicit memory, a memory format cheaper than model parameters and text retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Conceptually, with most of its knowledge externalized to explicit memories, the LLM can enjoy a smaller parameter size, training cost, and inference cost, all proportional to the amount of remaining "abstract knowledge". As a preliminary proof of concept, we train from scratch a 2.4B LLM, which achieves better performance than much larger LLMs as well as RAG models, and maintains higher decoding speed than RAG. The model is named Memory^3, since explicit memory is the third form of memory in LLMs after implicit memory (model parameters) and working memory (context key-values). We introduce a memory circuitry theory to support the externalization of knowledge, and present novel techniques including a memory sparsification mechanism that makes storage tractable and a two-stage pretraining scheme that facilitates memory formation.
M+: Extending MemoryLLM with Scalable Long-Term Memory
Equipping large language models (LLMs) with latent-space memory has attracted increasing attention as they can extend the context window of existing language models. However, retaining information from the distant past remains a challenge. For example, MemoryLLM (Wang et al., 2024a), as a representative work with latent-space memory, compresses past information into hidden states across all layers, forming a memory pool of 1B parameters. While effective for sequence lengths up to 16k tokens, it struggles to retain knowledge beyond 20k tokens. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing M+, a memory-augmented model based on MemoryLLM that significantly enhances long-term information retention. M+ integrates a long-term memory mechanism with a co-trained retriever, dynamically retrieving relevant information during text generation. We evaluate M+ on diverse benchmarks, including long-context understanding and knowledge retention tasks. Experimental results show that M+ significantly outperforms MemoryLLM and recent strong baselines, extending knowledge retention from under 20k to over 160k tokens with similar GPU memory overhead.
GraphGPT: Graph Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have advanced graph structure understanding via recursive information exchange and aggregation among graph nodes. To improve model robustness, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising approach for data augmentation. However, existing methods for generating pre-trained graph embeddings often rely on fine-tuning with specific downstream task labels, which limits their usability in scenarios where labeled data is scarce or unavailable. To address this, our research focuses on advancing the generalization capabilities of graph models in challenging zero-shot learning scenarios. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), we aim to develop a graph-oriented LLM that can achieve high generalization across diverse downstream datasets and tasks, even without any information available from the downstream graph data. In this work, we present the GraphGPT framework that aligns LLMs with graph structural knowledge with a graph instruction tuning paradigm. Our framework incorporates a text-graph grounding component to establish a connection between textual information and graph structures. Additionally, we propose a dual-stage instruction tuning paradigm, accompanied by a lightweight graph-text alignment projector. This paradigm explores self-supervised graph structural signals and task-specific graph instructions, to guide LLMs in understanding complex graph structures and improving their adaptability across different downstream tasks. Our framework is evaluated on supervised and zero-shot graph learning tasks, demonstrating superior generalization and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
Stage-wise Fine-tuning for Graph-to-Text Generation
Graph-to-text generation has benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs) in achieving better performance than structured graph encoders. However, they fail to fully utilize the structure information of the input graph. In this paper, we aim to further improve the performance of the pre-trained language model by proposing a structured graph-to-text model with a two-step fine-tuning mechanism which first fine-tunes the model on Wikipedia before adapting to the graph-to-text generation. In addition to using the traditional token and position embeddings to encode the knowledge graph (KG), we propose a novel tree-level embedding method to capture the inter-dependency structures of the input graph. This new approach has significantly improved the performance of all text generation metrics for the English WebNLG 2017 dataset.
Graph-Mamba: Towards Long-Range Graph Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
Attention mechanisms have been widely used to capture long-range dependencies among nodes in Graph Transformers. Bottlenecked by the quadratic computational cost, attention mechanisms fail to scale in large graphs. Recent improvements in computational efficiency are mainly achieved by attention sparsification with random or heuristic-based graph subsampling, which falls short in data-dependent context reasoning. State space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have gained prominence for their effectiveness and efficiency in modeling long-range dependencies in sequential data. However, adapting SSMs to non-sequential graph data presents a notable challenge. In this work, we introduce Graph-Mamba, the first attempt to enhance long-range context modeling in graph networks by integrating a Mamba block with the input-dependent node selection mechanism. Specifically, we formulate graph-centric node prioritization and permutation strategies to enhance context-aware reasoning, leading to a substantial improvement in predictive performance. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that Graph-Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods in long-range graph prediction tasks, with a fraction of the computational cost in both FLOPs and GPU memory consumption. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/bowang-lab/Graph-Mamba.
GraphInstruct: Empowering Large Language Models with Graph Understanding and Reasoning Capability
Evaluating and enhancing the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has been an important research topic. Graph is a common data structure in the real world, and understanding graph data is a crucial part for advancing general intelligence. To evaluate and enhance the graph understanding abilities of LLMs, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named GraphInstruct, which comprehensively includes 21 classical graph reasoning tasks, providing diverse graph generation pipelines and detailed reasoning steps. Based on GraphInstruct, we further construct GraphLM through efficient instruction-tuning, which shows prominent graph understanding capability. In order to enhance the LLM with graph reasoning capability as well, we propose a step mask training strategy, and construct a model named GraphLM+. As one of the pioneering efforts to enhance the graph understanding and reasoning abilities of LLMs, extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of GraphLM and GraphLM+ over other LLMs. We look forward to more researchers exploring the potential of LLMs in the graph data mining domain through GraphInstruct. Our code for generating GraphInstruct is released publicly at: https://github.com/CGCL-codes/GraphInstruct.
Are Large Language Models Temporally Grounded?
Are Large language models (LLMs) temporally grounded? Since LLMs cannot perceive and interact with the environment, it is impossible to answer this question directly. Instead, we provide LLMs with textual narratives and probe them with respect to their common-sense knowledge of the structure and duration of events, their ability to order events along a timeline, and self-consistency within their temporal model (e.g., temporal relations such as after and before are mutually exclusive for any pair of events). We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs (such as LLaMA 2 and GPT-4) on three tasks reflecting these abilities. Generally, we find that LLMs lag significantly behind both human performance as well as small-scale, specialised LMs. In-context learning, instruction tuning, and chain-of-thought prompting reduce this gap only to a limited degree. Crucially, LLMs struggle the most with self-consistency, displaying incoherent behaviour in at least 27.23% of their predictions. Contrary to expectations, we also find that scaling the model size does not guarantee positive gains in performance. To explain these results, we study the sources from which LLMs may gather temporal information: we find that sentence ordering in unlabelled texts, available during pre-training, is only weakly correlated with event ordering. Moreover, public instruction tuning mixtures contain few temporal tasks. Hence, we conclude that current LLMs lack a consistent temporal model of textual narratives. Code, datasets, and LLM outputs are available at https://github.com/yfqiu-nlp/temporal-llms.
About Graph Degeneracy, Representation Learning and Scalability
Graphs or networks are a very convenient way to represent data with lots of interaction. Recently, Machine Learning on Graph data has gained a lot of traction. In particular, vertex classification and missing edge detection have very interesting applications, ranging from drug discovery to recommender systems. To achieve such tasks, tremendous work has been accomplished to learn embedding of nodes and edges into finite-dimension vector spaces. This task is called Graph Representation Learning. However, Graph Representation Learning techniques often display prohibitive time and memory complexities, preventing their use in real-time with business size graphs. In this paper, we address this issue by leveraging a degeneracy property of Graphs - the K-Core Decomposition. We present two techniques taking advantage of this decomposition to reduce the time and memory consumption of walk-based Graph Representation Learning algorithms. We evaluate the performances, expressed in terms of quality of embedding and computational resources, of the proposed techniques on several academic datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/SBrandeis/kcore-embedding
Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning
Large language models (LLMs) learn temporal concepts from the co-occurrence of related tokens in a sequence. Compared with conventional text generation, temporal reasoning, which reaches a conclusion based on mathematical, logical and commonsense knowledge, is more challenging. In this paper, we propose TempGraph-LLM, a new paradigm towards text-based temporal reasoning. To be specific, we first teach LLMs to translate the context into a temporal graph. A synthetic dataset, which is fully controllable and requires minimal supervision, is constructed for pre-training on this task. We prove in experiments that LLMs benefit from the pre-training on other tasks. On top of that, we guide LLMs to perform symbolic reasoning with the strategies of Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) bootstrapping and special data augmentation. We observe that CoTs with symbolic reasoning bring more consistent and reliable results than those using free text.
Learning to Reason and Memorize with Self-Notes
Large language models have been shown to struggle with limited context memory and multi-step reasoning. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes. Unlike recent scratchpad approaches, the model can deviate from the input context at any time to explicitly think. This allows the model to recall information and perform reasoning on the fly as it reads the context, thus extending its memory and enabling multi-step reasoning. Our experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate that our method can successfully generalize to longer and more complicated instances from their training setup by taking Self-Notes at inference time.
MEMO: A Deep Network for Flexible Combination of Episodic Memories
Recent research developing neural network architectures with external memory have often used the benchmark bAbI question and answering dataset which provides a challenging number of tasks requiring reasoning. Here we employed a classic associative inference task from the memory-based reasoning neuroscience literature in order to more carefully probe the reasoning capacity of existing memory-augmented architectures. This task is thought to capture the essence of reasoning -- the appreciation of distant relationships among elements distributed across multiple facts or memories. Surprisingly, we found that current architectures struggle to reason over long distance associations. Similar results were obtained on a more complex task involving finding the shortest path between nodes in a path. We therefore developed MEMO, an architecture endowed with the capacity to reason over longer distances. This was accomplished with the addition of two novel components. First, it introduces a separation between memories (facts) stored in external memory and the items that comprise these facts in external memory. Second, it makes use of an adaptive retrieval mechanism, allowing a variable number of "memory hops" before the answer is produced. MEMO is capable of solving our novel reasoning tasks, as well as match state of the art results in bAbI.
Large Language Models Meet Text-Attributed Graphs: A Survey of Integration Frameworks and Applications
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing through strong semantic understanding and generation. However, their black-box nature limits structured and multi-hop reasoning. In contrast, Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) provide explicit relational structures enriched with textual context, yet often lack semantic depth. Recent research shows that combining LLMs and TAGs yields complementary benefits: enhancing TAG representation learning and improving the reasoning and interpretability of LLMs. This survey provides the first systematic review of LLM--TAG integration from an orchestration perspective. We introduce a novel taxonomy covering two fundamental directions: LLM for TAG, where LLMs enrich graph-based tasks, and TAG for LLM, where structured graphs improve LLM reasoning. We categorize orchestration strategies into sequential, parallel, and multi-module frameworks, and discuss advances in TAG-specific pretraining, prompting, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Beyond methodology, we summarize empirical insights, curate available datasets, and highlight diverse applications across recommendation systems, biomedical analysis, and knowledge-intensive question answering. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising research directions, aiming to guide future work at the intersection of language and graph learning.
Episodic Memories Generation and Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Episodic memory -- the ability to recall specific events grounded in time and space -- is a cornerstone of human cognition, enabling not only coherent storytelling, but also planning and decision-making. Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) lack a robust mechanism for episodic memory: we argue that integrating episodic memory capabilities into LLM is essential for advancing AI towards human-like cognition, increasing their potential to reason consistently and ground their output in real-world episodic events, hence avoiding confabulations. To address this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive framework to model and evaluate LLM episodic memory capabilities. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we develop a structured approach to represent episodic events, encapsulating temporal and spatial contexts, involved entities, and detailed descriptions. We synthesize a unique episodic memory benchmark, free from contamination, and release open source code and datasets to assess LLM performance across various recall and episodic reasoning tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4 and Claude variants, Llama 3.1, and o1-mini, reveals that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with episodic memory tasks, particularly when dealing with multiple related events or complex spatio-temporal relationships -- even in contexts as short as 10k-100k tokens.
Knowledge Homophily in Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly studied as neural knowledge bases for supporting knowledge-intensive applications such as question answering and fact checking. However, the structural organization of their knowledge remains unexplored. Inspired by cognitive neuroscience findings, such as semantic clustering and priming, where knowing one fact increases the likelihood of recalling related facts, we investigate an analogous knowledge homophily pattern in LLMs. To this end, we map LLM knowledge into a graph representation through knowledge checking at both the triplet and entity levels. After that, we analyze the knowledgeability relationship between an entity and its neighbors, discovering that LLMs tend to possess a similar level of knowledge about entities positioned closer in the graph. Motivated by this homophily principle, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) regression model to estimate entity-level knowledgeability scores for triplets by leveraging their neighborhood scores. The predicted knowledgeability enables us to prioritize checking less well-known triplets, thereby maximizing knowledge coverage under the same labeling budget. This not only improves the efficiency of active labeling for fine-tuning to inject knowledge into LLMs but also enhances multi-hop path retrieval in reasoning-intensive question answering.
C3KG: A Chinese Commonsense Conversation Knowledge Graph
Existing commonsense knowledge bases often organize tuples in an isolated manner, which is deficient for commonsense conversational models to plan the next steps. To fill the gap, we curate a large-scale multi-turn human-written conversation corpus, and create the first Chinese commonsense conversation knowledge graph which incorporates both social commonsense knowledge and dialog flow information. To show the potential of our graph, we develop a graph-conversation matching approach, and benchmark two graph-grounded conversational tasks.
Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models
Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing user data), degrades utility (repeated easy-to-memorize text is often low quality), and hurts fairness (some texts are memorized over others). We describe three log-linear relationships that quantify the degree to which LMs emit memorized training data. Memorization significantly grows as we increase (1) the capacity of a model, (2) the number of times an example has been duplicated, and (3) the number of tokens of context used to prompt the model. Surprisingly, we find the situation becomes more complicated when generalizing these results across model families. On the whole, we find that memorization in LMs is more prevalent than previously believed and will likely get worse as models continues to scale, at least without active mitigations.
Beyond Chain-of-Thought, Effective Graph-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models
With the widespread use of large language models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, researchers have discovered the potential of Chain-of-thought (CoT) to assist LLMs in accomplishing complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate steps. However, human thought processes are often non-linear, rather than simply sequential chains of thoughts. Therefore, we propose Graph-of-Thought (GoT) reasoning, which models human thought processes not only as a chain but also as a graph. By representing thought units as nodes and connections between them as edges, our approach captures the non-sequential nature of human thinking and allows for a more realistic modeling of thought processes. Similar to Multimodal-CoT, we modeled GoT reasoning as a two-stage framework, generating rationales first and then producing the final answer. Specifically, we employ an additional graph-of-thoughts encoder for GoT representation learning and fuse the GoT representation with the original input representation through a gated fusion mechanism. We implement a GoT reasoning model on the T5 pre-trained model and evaluate its performance on a text-only reasoning task (GSM8K) and a multimodal reasoning task (ScienceQA). Our model achieves significant improvement over the strong CoT baseline with 3.41% and 5.08% on the GSM8K test set with T5-base and T5-large architectures, respectively. Additionally, our model boosts accuracy from 84.91% to 91.54% using the T5-base model and from 91.68% to 92.77% using the T5-large model over the state-of-the-art Multimodal-CoT on the ScienceQA test set. Experiments have shown that GoT achieves comparable results to Multimodal-CoT(large) with over 700M parameters, despite having fewer than 250M backbone model parameters, demonstrating the effectiveness of GoT.
A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents
While large language model (LLM) agents can effectively use external tools for complex real-world tasks, they require memory systems to leverage historical experiences. Current memory systems enable basic storage and retrieval but lack sophisticated memory organization, despite recent attempts to incorporate graph databases. Moreover, these systems' fixed operations and structures limit their adaptability across diverse tasks. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel agentic memory system for LLM agents that can dynamically organize memories in an agentic way. Following the basic principles of the Zettelkasten method, we designed our memory system to create interconnected knowledge networks through dynamic indexing and linking. When a new memory is added, we generate a comprehensive note containing multiple structured attributes, including contextual descriptions, keywords, and tags. The system then analyzes historical memories to identify relevant connections, establishing links where meaningful similarities exist. Additionally, this process enables memory evolution - as new memories are integrated, they can trigger updates to the contextual representations and attributes of existing historical memories, allowing the memory network to continuously refine its understanding. Our approach combines the structured organization principles of Zettelkasten with the flexibility of agent-driven decision making, allowing for more adaptive and context-aware memory management. Empirical experiments on six foundation models show superior improvement against existing SOTA baselines. The source code for evaluating performance is available at https://github.com/WujiangXu/AgenticMemory, while the source code of agentic memory system is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/A-mem.
Leveraging Graph Structures to Detect Hallucinations in Large Language Models
Large language models are extensively applied across a wide range of tasks, such as customer support, content creation, educational tutoring, and providing financial guidance. However, a well-known drawback is their predisposition to generate hallucinations. This damages the trustworthiness of the information these models provide, impacting decision-making and user confidence. We propose a method to detect hallucinations by looking at the structure of the latent space and finding associations within hallucinated and non-hallucinated generations. We create a graph structure that connects generations that lie closely in the embedding space. Moreover, we employ a Graph Attention Network which utilizes message passing to aggregate information from neighboring nodes and assigns varying degrees of importance to each neighbor based on their relevance. Our findings show that 1) there exists a structure in the latent space that differentiates between hallucinated and non-hallucinated generations, 2) Graph Attention Networks can learn this structure and generalize it to unseen generations, and 3) the robustness of our method is enhanced when incorporating contrastive learning. When evaluated against evidence-based benchmarks, our model performs similarly without access to search-based methods.
Language Models of Code are Few-Shot Commonsense Learners
We address the general task of structured commonsense reasoning: given a natural language input, the goal is to generate a graph such as an event -- or a reasoning-graph. To employ large language models (LMs) for this task, existing approaches ``serialize'' the output graph as a flat list of nodes and edges. Although feasible, these serialized graphs strongly deviate from the natural language corpora that LMs were pre-trained on, hindering LMs from generating them correctly. In this paper, we show that when we instead frame structured commonsense reasoning tasks as code generation tasks, pre-trained LMs of code are better structured commonsense reasoners than LMs of natural language, even when the downstream task does not involve source code at all. We demonstrate our approach across three diverse structured commonsense reasoning tasks. In all these natural language tasks, we show that using our approach, a code generation LM (CODEX) outperforms natural-LMs that are fine-tuned on the target task (e.g., T5) and other strong LMs such as GPT-3 in the few-shot setting.
Graph schemas as abstractions for transfer learning, inference, and planning
Transferring latent structure from one environment or problem to another is a mechanism by which humans and animals generalize with very little data. Inspired by cognitive and neurobiological insights, we propose graph schemas as a mechanism of abstraction for transfer learning. Graph schemas start with latent graph learning where perceptually aliased observations are disambiguated in the latent space using contextual information. Latent graph learning is also emerging as a new computational model of the hippocampus to explain map learning and transitive inference. Our insight is that a latent graph can be treated as a flexible template -- a schema -- that models concepts and behaviors, with slots that bind groups of latent nodes to the specific observations or groundings. By treating learned latent graphs (schemas) as prior knowledge, new environments can be quickly learned as compositions of schemas and their newly learned bindings. We evaluate graph schemas on two previously published challenging tasks: the memory & planning game and one-shot StreetLearn, which are designed to test rapid task solving in novel environments. Graph schemas can be learned in far fewer episodes than previous baselines, and can model and plan in a few steps in novel variations of these tasks. We also demonstrate learning, matching, and reusing graph schemas in more challenging 2D and 3D environments with extensive perceptual aliasing and size variations, and show how different schemas can be composed to model larger and more complex environments. To summarize, our main contribution is a unified system, inspired and grounded in cognitive science, that facilitates rapid transfer learning of new environments using schemas via map-induction and composition that handles perceptual aliasing.
The Reasoning-Memorization Interplay in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction
Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the precise conditions under which LLMs switch between reasoning and memorization during text generation remain unclear. In this work, we provide a mechanistic understanding of LLMs' reasoning-memorization dynamics by identifying a set of linear features in the model's residual stream that govern the balance between genuine reasoning and memory recall. These features not only distinguish reasoning tasks from memory-intensive ones but can also be manipulated to causally influence model performance on reasoning tasks. Additionally, we show that intervening in these reasoning features helps the model more accurately activate the most relevant problem-solving capabilities during answer generation. Our findings offer new insights into the underlying mechanisms of reasoning and memory in LLMs and pave the way for the development of more robust and interpretable generative AI systems.
Word Grounded Graph Convolutional Network
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have shown strong performance in learning text representations for various tasks such as text classification, due to its expressive power in modeling graph structure data (e.g., a literature citation network). Most existing GCNs are limited to deal with documents included in a pre-defined graph, i.e., it cannot be generalized to out-of-graph documents. To address this issue, we propose to transform the document graph into a word graph, to decouple data samples (i.e., documents in training and test sets) and a GCN model by using a document-independent graph. Such word-level GCN could therefore naturally inference out-of-graph documents in an inductive way. The proposed Word-level Graph (WGraph) can not only implicitly learning word presentation with commonly-used word co-occurrences in corpora, but also incorporate extra global semantic dependency derived from inter-document relationships (e.g., literature citations). An inductive Word-grounded Graph Convolutional Network (WGCN) is proposed to learn word and document representations based on WGraph in a supervised manner. Experiments on text classification with and without citation networks evidence that the proposed WGCN model outperforms existing methods in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
RAG vs. GraphRAG: A Systematic Evaluation and Key Insights
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the performance of LLMs across various tasks by retrieving relevant information from external sources, particularly on text-based data. For structured data, such as knowledge graphs, GraphRAG has been widely used to retrieve relevant information. However, recent studies have revealed that structuring implicit knowledge from text into graphs can benefit certain tasks, extending the application of GraphRAG from graph data to general text-based data. Despite their successful extensions, most applications of GraphRAG for text data have been designed for specific tasks and datasets, lacking a systematic evaluation and comparison between RAG and GraphRAG on widely used text-based benchmarks. In this paper, we systematically evaluate RAG and GraphRAG on well-established benchmark tasks, such as Question Answering and Query-based Summarization. Our results highlight the distinct strengths of RAG and GraphRAG across different tasks and evaluation perspectives. Inspired by these observations, we investigate strategies to integrate their strengths to improve downstream tasks. Additionally, we provide an in-depth discussion of the shortcomings of current GraphRAG approaches and outline directions for future research.
NodePiece: Compositional and Parameter-Efficient Representations of Large Knowledge Graphs
Conventional representation learning algorithms for knowledge graphs (KG) map each entity to a unique embedding vector. Such a shallow lookup results in a linear growth of memory consumption for storing the embedding matrix and incurs high computational costs when working with real-world KGs. Drawing parallels with subword tokenization commonly used in NLP, we explore the landscape of more parameter-efficient node embedding strategies with possibly sublinear memory requirements. To this end, we propose NodePiece, an anchor-based approach to learn a fixed-size entity vocabulary. In NodePiece, a vocabulary of subword/sub-entity units is constructed from anchor nodes in a graph with known relation types. Given such a fixed-size vocabulary, it is possible to bootstrap an encoding and embedding for any entity, including those unseen during training. Experiments show that NodePiece performs competitively in node classification, link prediction, and relation prediction tasks while retaining less than 10% of explicit nodes in a graph as anchors and often having 10x fewer parameters. To this end, we show that a NodePiece-enabled model outperforms existing shallow models on a large OGB WikiKG 2 graph having 70x fewer parameters.
End-To-End Memory Networks
We introduce a neural network with a recurrent attention model over a possibly large external memory. The architecture is a form of Memory Network (Weston et al., 2015) but unlike the model in that work, it is trained end-to-end, and hence requires significantly less supervision during training, making it more generally applicable in realistic settings. It can also be seen as an extension of RNNsearch to the case where multiple computational steps (hops) are performed per output symbol. The flexibility of the model allows us to apply it to tasks as diverse as (synthetic) question answering and to language modeling. For the former our approach is competitive with Memory Networks, but with less supervision. For the latter, on the Penn TreeBank and Text8 datasets our approach demonstrates comparable performance to RNNs and LSTMs. In both cases we show that the key concept of multiple computational hops yields improved results.
MemoryPrompt: A Light Wrapper to Improve Context Tracking in Pre-trained Language Models
Transformer-based language models (LMs) track contextual information through large, hard-coded input windows. We introduce MemoryPrompt, a leaner approach in which the LM is complemented by a small auxiliary recurrent network that passes information to the LM by prefixing its regular input with a sequence of vectors, akin to soft prompts, without requiring LM finetuning. Tested on a task designed to probe a LM's ability to keep track of multiple fact updates, a MemoryPrompt-augmented LM outperforms much larger LMs that have access to the full input history. We also test MemoryPrompt on a long-distance dialogue dataset, where its performance is comparable to that of a model conditioned on the entire conversation history. In both experiments we also observe that, unlike full-finetuning approaches, MemoryPrompt does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting when adapted to new tasks, thus not disrupting the generalist capabilities of the underlying LM.
Transformers Struggle to Learn to Search
Search is an ability foundational in many important tasks, and recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) struggle to perform search robustly. It is unknown whether this inability is due to a lack of data, insufficient model parameters, or fundamental limitations of the transformer architecture. In this work, we use the foundational graph connectivity problem as a testbed to generate effectively limitless high-coverage data to train small transformers and test whether they can learn to perform search. We find that, when given the right training distribution, the transformer is able to learn to search. We analyze the algorithm that the transformer has learned through a novel mechanistic interpretability technique that enables us to extract the computation graph from the trained model. We find that for each vertex in the input graph, transformers compute the set of vertices reachable from that vertex. Each layer then progressively expands these sets, allowing the model to search over a number of vertices exponential in the number of layers. However, we find that as the input graph size increases, the transformer has greater difficulty in learning the task. This difficulty is not resolved even as the number of parameters is increased, suggesting that increasing model scale will not lead to robust search abilities. We also find that performing search in-context (i.e., chain-of-thought) does not resolve this inability to learn to search on larger graphs.
GraphOmni: A Comprehensive and Extendable Benchmark Framework for Large Language Models on Graph-theoretic Tasks
In this paper, we presented GraphOmni, a comprehensive benchmark framework for systematically evaluating the graph reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By analyzing critical dimensions, including graph types, serialization formats, and prompt schemes, we provided extensive insights into the strengths and limitations of current LLMs. Our empirical findings emphasize that no single serialization or prompting strategy consistently outperforms others. Motivated by these insights, we propose a reinforcement learning-based approach that dynamically selects the best serialization-prompt pairings, resulting in significant accuracy improvements. GraphOmni's modular and extensible design establishes a robust foundation for future research, facilitating advancements toward general-purpose graph reasoning models.
Enhancing LLM's Cognition via Structurization
When reading long-form text, human cognition is complex and structurized. While large language models (LLMs) process input contexts through a causal and sequential perspective, this approach can potentially limit their ability to handle intricate and complex inputs effectively. To enhance LLM's cognition capability, this paper presents a novel concept of context structurization. Specifically, we transform the plain, unordered contextual sentences into well-ordered and hierarchically structurized elements. By doing so, LLMs can better grasp intricate and extended contexts through precise attention and information-seeking along the organized structures. Extensive evaluations are conducted across various model architectures and sizes (including a series of auto-regressive LLMs as well as BERT-like masking models) on a diverse set of NLP tasks (e.g., context-based question-answering, exhaustive hallucination evaluation, and passage-level dense retrieval). Empirical results show consistent and significant performance gains afforded by a single-round structurization. In particular, we boost the open-sourced LLaMA2-70B model to achieve comparable performance against GPT-3.5-Turbo as the hallucination evaluator. Besides, we show the feasibility of distilling advanced LLMs' language processing abilities to a smaller yet effective StruXGPT-7B to execute structurization, addressing the practicality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/struxgpt.
GRS-QA -- Graph Reasoning-Structured Question Answering Dataset
Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in multi-hop question-answering (M-QA) due to their advanced reasoning abilities. However, the impact of the inherent reasoning structures on LLM M-QA performance remains unclear, largely due to the absence of QA datasets that provide fine-grained reasoning structures. To address this gap, we introduce the Graph Reasoning-Structured Question Answering Dataset (GRS-QA), which includes both semantic contexts and reasoning structures for QA pairs. Unlike existing M-QA datasets, where different reasoning structures are entangled together, GRS-QA explicitly captures intricate reasoning pathways by constructing reasoning graphs, where nodes represent textual contexts and edges denote logical flows. These reasoning graphs of different structures enable a fine-grained evaluation of LLM reasoning capabilities across various reasoning structures. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs perform differently when handling questions with varying reasoning structures. This finding facilitates the exploration of textual structures as compared with semantics.
DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) generate discourse-level, multi-sentence visual descriptions, challenging text scene graph parsers built for single-sentence caption-to-graph mapping. Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, often missing phenomena like cross-sentence coreference, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream VLM task performance. We introduce a new task, Discourse-level text Scene Graph parsing (DiscoSG), and release DiscoSG-DS, a dataset of 400 expert-annotated and 8,430 synthesised multi-sentence caption-graph pairs. Each caption averages 9 sentences, and each graph contains at least 3 times more triples than those in existing datasets. Fine-tuning GPT-4o on DiscoSG-DS yields over 40% higher SPICE metric than the best sentence-merging baseline. However, its high inference cost and licensing restrict open-source use. Smaller fine-tuned open-source models (e.g., Flan-T5) perform well on simpler graphs yet degrade on denser, more complex graphs. To bridge this gap, we introduce DiscoSG-Refiner, a lightweight open-source parser that drafts a seed graph and iteratively refines it with a novel learned graph-editing model, achieving 30% higher SPICE than the baseline while delivering 86 times faster inference than GPT-4o. It generalises from simple to dense graphs, thereby consistently improving downstream VLM tasks, including discourse-level caption evaluation and hallucination detection, outperforming alternative open-source parsers. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ShaoqLin/DiscoSG .
Language Models are Graph Learners
Language Models (LMs) are increasingly challenging the dominance of domain-specific models, including Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers (GTs), in graph learning tasks. Following this trend, we propose a novel approach that empowers off-the-shelf LMs to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art GNNs on node classification tasks, without requiring any architectural modification. By preserving the LM's original architecture, our approach retains a key benefit of LM instruction tuning: the ability to jointly train on diverse datasets, fostering greater flexibility and efficiency. To achieve this, we introduce two key augmentation strategies: (1) Enriching LMs' input using topological and semantic retrieval methods, which provide richer contextual information, and (2) guiding the LMs' classification process through a lightweight GNN classifier that effectively prunes class candidates. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that backbone Flan-T5 models equipped with these augmentation strategies outperform state-of-the-art text-output node classifiers and are comparable to top-performing vector-output node classifiers. By bridging the gap between specialized task-specific node classifiers and general LMs, this work paves the way for more versatile and widely applicable graph learning models. We will open-source the code upon publication.
Working Memory Capacity of ChatGPT: An Empirical Study
Working memory is a critical aspect of both human intelligence and artificial intelligence, serving as a workspace for the temporary storage and manipulation of information. In this paper, we systematically assess the working memory capacity of ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo), a large language model developed by OpenAI, by examining its performance in verbal and spatial n-back tasks under various conditions. Our experiments reveal that ChatGPT experiences significant declines in performance as n increases (which necessitates more information to be stored in working memory), suggesting a limit to the working memory capacity strikingly similar to that of humans. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of different instruction strategies on ChatGPT's performance and observe that the fundamental patterns of a capacity limit persist. From our empirical findings, we propose that n-back tasks may serve as tools for benchmarking the working memory capacity of large language models and hold potential for informing future efforts aimed at enhancing AI working memory and deepening our understanding of human working memory through AI models.
DocGraphLM: Documental Graph Language Model for Information Extraction
Advances in Visually Rich Document Understanding (VrDU) have enabled information extraction and question answering over documents with complex layouts. Two tropes of architectures have emerged -- transformer-based models inspired by LLMs, and Graph Neural Networks. In this paper, we introduce DocGraphLM, a novel framework that combines pre-trained language models with graph semantics. To achieve this, we propose 1) a joint encoder architecture to represent documents, and 2) a novel link prediction approach to reconstruct document graphs. DocGraphLM predicts both directions and distances between nodes using a convergent joint loss function that prioritizes neighborhood restoration and downweighs distant node detection. Our experiments on three SotA datasets show consistent improvement on IE and QA tasks with the adoption of graph features. Moreover, we report that adopting the graph features accelerates convergence in the learning process during training, despite being solely constructed through link prediction.
LEGO-GraphRAG: Modularizing Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Design Space Exploration
GraphRAG addresses significant challenges in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by leveraging graphs with embedded knowledge to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its promising potential, the GraphRAG community currently lacks a unified framework for fine-grained decomposition of the graph-based knowledge retrieval process. Furthermore, there is no systematic categorization or evaluation of existing solutions within the retrieval process. In this paper, we present LEGO-GraphRAG, a modular framework that decomposes the retrieval process of GraphRAG into three interconnected modules: subgraph-extraction, path-filtering, and path-refinement. We systematically summarize and classify the algorithms and neural network (NN) models relevant to each module, providing a clearer understanding of the design space for GraphRAG instances. Additionally, we identify key design factors, such as Graph Coupling and Computational Cost, that influence the effectiveness of GraphRAG implementations. Through extensive empirical studies, we construct high-quality GraphRAG instances using a representative selection of solutions and analyze their impact on retrieval and reasoning performance. Our findings offer critical insights into optimizing GraphRAG instance design, ultimately contributing to the advancement of more accurate and contextually relevant LLM applications.
Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models
Memory is one of the most essential cognitive functions serving as a repository of world knowledge and episodes of activities. In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memorizing ability. On the contrary, vanilla neural networks without pre-training have been long observed suffering from the catastrophic forgetting problem. To investigate such a retentive-forgetful contradiction and understand the memory mechanism of language models, we conduct thorough experiments by controlling the target knowledge types, the learning strategies and the learning schedules. We find that: 1) Vanilla language models are forgetful; 2) Pre-training leads to retentive language models; 3) Knowledge relevance and diversification significantly influence the memory formation. These conclusions are useful for understanding the abilities of pre-trained language models and shed light on designing and evaluating new learning and inference algorithms of language models.
Memorization neq Understanding: Do Large Language Models Have the Ability of Scenario Cognition?
Driven by vast and diverse textual data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, a critical question persists: does their generalization arise from mere memorization of training data or from deep semantic understanding? To investigate this, we propose a bi-perspective evaluation framework to assess LLMs' scenario cognition - the ability to link semantic scenario elements with their arguments in context. Specifically, we introduce a novel scenario-based dataset comprising diverse textual descriptions of fictional facts, annotated with scenario elements. LLMs are evaluated through their capacity to answer scenario-related questions (model output perspective) and via probing their internal representations for encoded scenario elements-argument associations (internal representation perspective). Our experiments reveal that current LLMs predominantly rely on superficial memorization, failing to achieve robust semantic scenario cognition, even in simple cases. These findings expose critical limitations in LLMs' semantic understanding and offer cognitive insights for advancing their capabilities.
GraphPrompt: Unifying Pre-Training and Downstream Tasks for Graph Neural Networks
Graphs can model complex relationships between objects, enabling a myriad of Web applications such as online page/article classification and social recommendation. While graph neural networks(GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for graph representation learning, in an end-to-end supervised setting, their performance heavily rely on a large amount of task-specific supervision. To reduce labeling requirement, the "pre-train, fine-tune" and "pre-train, prompt" paradigms have become increasingly common. In particular, prompting is a popular alternative to fine-tuning in natural language processing, which is designed to narrow the gap between pre-training and downstream objectives in a task-specific manner. However, existing study of prompting on graphs is still limited, lacking a universal treatment to appeal to different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose GraphPrompt, a novel pre-training and prompting framework on graphs. GraphPrompt not only unifies pre-training and downstream tasks into a common task template, but also employs a learnable prompt to assist a downstream task in locating the most relevant knowledge from the pre-train model in a task-specific manner. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets to evaluate and analyze GraphPrompt.
Modeling Graph Structure in Transformer for Better AMR-to-Text Generation
Recent studies on AMR-to-text generation often formalize the task as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning problem by converting an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph into a word sequence. Graph structures are further modeled into the seq2seq framework in order to utilize the structural information in the AMR graphs. However, previous approaches only consider the relations between directly connected concepts while ignoring the rich structure in AMR graphs. In this paper we eliminate such a strong limitation and propose a novel structure-aware self-attention approach to better modeling the relations between indirectly connected concepts in the state-of-the-art seq2seq model, i.e., the Transformer. In particular, a few different methods are explored to learn structural representations between two concepts. Experimental results on English AMR benchmark datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art with 29.66 and 31.82 BLEU scores on LDC2015E86 and LDC2017T10, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the best results achieved so far by supervised models on the benchmarks.
HMT: Hierarchical Memory Transformer for Long Context Language Processing
Transformer-based large language models (LLM) have been widely used in language processing applications. However, most of them restrict the context window that permits the model to attend to every token in the inputs. Previous works in recurrent models can memorize past tokens to enable unlimited context and maintain effectiveness. However, they have "flat" memory architectures, which have limitations in selecting and filtering information. Since humans are good at learning and self-adjustment, we speculate that imitating brain memory hierarchy is beneficial for model memorization. We propose the Hierarchical Memory Transformer (HMT), a novel framework that enables and improves models' long-context processing ability by imitating human memorization behavior. Leveraging memory-augmented segment-level recurrence, we organize the memory hierarchy by preserving tokens from early input token segments, passing memory embeddings along the sequence, and recalling relevant information from history. Evaluating general language modeling (Wikitext-103, PG-19) and question-answering tasks (PubMedQA), we show that HMT steadily improves the long-context processing ability of context-constrained and long-context models. With an additional 0.5% - 2% of parameters, HMT can easily plug in and augment future LLMs to handle long context effectively. Our code is open-sourced on Github: https://github.com/OswaldHe/HMT-pytorch.
LOGIN: A Large Language Model Consulted Graph Neural Network Training Framework
Recent prevailing works on graph machine learning typically follow a similar methodology that involves designing advanced variants of graph neural networks (GNNs) to maintain the superior performance of GNNs on different graphs. In this paper, we aim to streamline the GNN design process and leverage the advantages of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve the performance of GNNs on downstream tasks. We formulate a new paradigm, coined "LLMs-as-Consultants," which integrates LLMs with GNNs in an interactive manner. A framework named LOGIN (LLM Consulted GNN training) is instantiated, empowering the interactive utilization of LLMs within the GNN training process. First, we attentively craft concise prompts for spotted nodes, carrying comprehensive semantic and topological information, and serving as input to LLMs. Second, we refine GNNs by devising a complementary coping mechanism that utilizes the responses from LLMs, depending on their correctness. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of LOGIN on node classification tasks across both homophilic and heterophilic graphs. The results illustrate that even basic GNN architectures, when employed within the proposed LLMs-as-Consultants paradigm, can achieve comparable performance to advanced GNNs with intricate designs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/QiaoYRan/LOGIN.
Charting the Design Space of Neural Graph Representations for Subgraph Matching
Subgraph matching is vital in knowledge graph (KG) question answering, molecule design, scene graph, code and circuit search, etc. Neural methods have shown promising results for subgraph matching. Our study of recent systems suggests refactoring them into a unified design space for graph matching networks. Existing methods occupy only a few isolated patches in this space, which remains largely uncharted. We undertake the first comprehensive exploration of this space, featuring such axes as attention-based vs. soft permutation-based interaction between query and corpus graphs, aligning nodes vs. edges, and the form of the final scoring network that integrates neural representations of the graphs. Our extensive experiments reveal that judicious and hitherto-unexplored combinations of choices in this space lead to large performance benefits. Beyond better performance, our study uncovers valuable insights and establishes general design principles for neural graph representation and interaction, which may be of wider interest.
Hindsight is 20/20: Building Agent Memory that Retains, Recalls, and Reflects
Agent memory has been touted as a dimension of growth for LLM-based applications, enabling agents that can accumulate experience, adapt across sessions, and move beyond single-shot question answering. The current generation of agent memory systems treats memory as an external layer that extracts salient snippets from conversations, stores them in vector or graph-based stores, and retrieves top-k items into the prompt of an otherwise stateless model. While these systems improve personalization and context carry-over, they still blur the line between evidence and inference, struggle to organize information over long horizons, and offer limited support for agents that must explain their reasoning. We present Hindsight, a memory architecture that treats agent memory as a structured, first-class substrate for reasoning by organizing it into four logical networks that distinguish world facts, agent experiences, synthesized entity summaries, and evolving beliefs. This framework supports three core operations -- retain, recall, and reflect -- that govern how information is added, accessed, and updated. Under this abstraction, a temporal, entity aware memory layer incrementally turns conversational streams into a structured, queryable memory bank, while a reflection layer reasons over this bank to produce answers and to update information in a traceable way. On key long-horizon conversational memory benchmarks like LongMemEval and LoCoMo, Hindsight with an open-source 20B model lifts overall accuracy from 39% to 83.6% over a full-context baseline with the same backbone and outperforms full context GPT-4o. Scaling the backbone further pushes Hindsight to 91.4% on LongMemEval and up to 89.61% on LoCoMo (vs. 75.78% for the strongest prior open system), consistently outperforming existing memory architectures on multi-session and open-domain questions.
Learning to Retrieve and Reason on Knowledge Graph through Active Self-Reflection
Extensive research has investigated the integration of large language models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs to enhance the reasoning process. However, understanding how models perform reasoning utilizing structured graph knowledge remains underexplored. Most existing approaches rely on LLMs or retrievers to make binary judgments regarding the utilization of knowledge, which is too coarse. Meanwhile, there is still a lack of feedback mechanisms for reflection and correction throughout the entire reasoning path. This paper proposes an Active self-Reflection framework for knowledge Graph reasoning ARG, introducing for the first time an end-to-end training approach to achieve iterative reasoning grounded on structured graphs. Within the framework, the model leverages special tokens to actively determine whether knowledge retrieval is necessary, performs reflective critique based on the retrieved knowledge, and iteratively reasons over the knowledge graph. The reasoning paths generated by the model exhibit high interpretability, enabling deeper exploration of the model's understanding of structured knowledge. Ultimately, the proposed model achieves outstanding results compared to existing baselines in knowledge graph reasoning tasks.
