G1: Teaching LLMs to Reason on Graphs with Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guo, Xiaojun, Li, Ang, Wang, Yifei, Jegelka, Stefanie, Wang, Yisen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Guo, Xiaojun
Li, Ang
Wang, Yifei
Jegelka, Stefanie
Wang, Yisen
author_facet Guo, Xiaojun
Li, Ang
Wang, Yifei
Jegelka, Stefanie
Wang, Yisen
contents 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 Erdõs, 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 Erdõs, 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. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/PKU-ML/G1, with models and datasets hosted on Hugging Face collections https://huggingface.co/collections/PKU-ML/g1-683d659e992794fc99618cf2 for broader accessibility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18499
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle G1: Teaching LLMs to Reason on Graphs with Reinforcement Learning
Guo, Xiaojun
Li, Ang
Wang, Yifei
Jegelka, Stefanie
Wang, Yisen
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
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 Erdõs, 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 Erdõs, 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. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/PKU-ML/G1, with models and datasets hosted on Hugging Face collections https://huggingface.co/collections/PKU-ML/g1-683d659e992794fc99618cf2 for broader accessibility.
title G1: Teaching LLMs to Reason on Graphs with Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18499