GraphCogent: Mitigating LLMs' Working Memory Constraints via Multi-Agent Collaboration in Complex Graph Understanding

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Main Authors: Wang, Rongzheng, Liang, Shuang, Chen, Qizhi, Huang, Yihong, Li, Muquan, Ma, Yizhuo, Zhang, Dongyang, Qin, Ke, Leung, Man-Fai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Rongzheng
Liang, Shuang
Chen, Qizhi
Huang, Yihong
Li, Muquan
Ma, Yizhuo
Zhang, Dongyang
Qin, Ke
Leung, Man-Fai
author_facet Wang, Rongzheng
Liang, Shuang
Chen, Qizhi
Huang, Yihong
Li, Muquan
Ma, Yizhuo
Zhang, Dongyang
Qin, Ke
Leung, Man-Fai
contents Large language models (LLMs) show promising performance on small-scale graph reasoning tasks but fail when handling real-world graphs with complex queries. This phenomenon arises from LLMs' working memory constraints, which result in their inability to retain long-range graph topology over extended contexts while sustaining coherent multi-step reasoning. However, real-world graphs are often structurally complex, such as Web, Transportation, Social, and Citation networks. To address these limitations, we propose GraphCogent, a collaborative agent framework inspired by human Working Memory Model that decomposes graph reasoning into specialized cognitive processes: sense, buffer, and execute. The framework consists of three modules: Sensory Module standardizes diverse graph text representations via subgraph sampling, Buffer Module integrates and indexes graph data across multiple formats, and Execution Module combines tool calling and tool creation for efficient reasoning. We also introduce Graph4real, a comprehensive benchmark that contains four domains of real-world graphs (Web, Transportation, Social, and Citation) to evaluate LLMs' graph reasoning capabilities. Our Graph4real covers 21 different graph reasoning tasks, categorized into three types (Structural Querying, Algorithmic Reasoning, and Predictive Modeling tasks), with graph scales up to 10 times larger than existing benchmarks. Experiments show that Llama3.1-8B based GraphCogent achieves a 50% improvement over massive-scale LLMs like DeepSeek-R1 (671B). Compared to state-of-the-art agent-based baseline, our framework outperforms by 20% in accuracy while reducing token usage by 80% for in-toolset tasks and 30% for out-toolset tasks. Code will be available after review.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12379
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GraphCogent: Mitigating LLMs' Working Memory Constraints via Multi-Agent Collaboration in Complex Graph Understanding
Wang, Rongzheng
Liang, Shuang
Chen, Qizhi
Huang, Yihong
Li, Muquan
Ma, Yizhuo
Zhang, Dongyang
Qin, Ke
Leung, Man-Fai
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) show promising performance on small-scale graph reasoning tasks but fail when handling real-world graphs with complex queries. This phenomenon arises from LLMs' working memory constraints, which result in their inability to retain long-range graph topology over extended contexts while sustaining coherent multi-step reasoning. However, real-world graphs are often structurally complex, such as Web, Transportation, Social, and Citation networks. To address these limitations, we propose GraphCogent, a collaborative agent framework inspired by human Working Memory Model that decomposes graph reasoning into specialized cognitive processes: sense, buffer, and execute. The framework consists of three modules: Sensory Module standardizes diverse graph text representations via subgraph sampling, Buffer Module integrates and indexes graph data across multiple formats, and Execution Module combines tool calling and tool creation for efficient reasoning. We also introduce Graph4real, a comprehensive benchmark that contains four domains of real-world graphs (Web, Transportation, Social, and Citation) to evaluate LLMs' graph reasoning capabilities. Our Graph4real covers 21 different graph reasoning tasks, categorized into three types (Structural Querying, Algorithmic Reasoning, and Predictive Modeling tasks), with graph scales up to 10 times larger than existing benchmarks. Experiments show that Llama3.1-8B based GraphCogent achieves a 50% improvement over massive-scale LLMs like DeepSeek-R1 (671B). Compared to state-of-the-art agent-based baseline, our framework outperforms by 20% in accuracy while reducing token usage by 80% for in-toolset tasks and 30% for out-toolset tasks. Code will be available after review.
title GraphCogent: Mitigating LLMs' Working Memory Constraints via Multi-Agent Collaboration in Complex Graph Understanding
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12379