LLM as Graph Kernel: Rethinking Message Passing on Text-Rich Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Ying, Yu, Hang, Zhang, Haipeng, Di, Peng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917478747078656
author Zhang, Ying
Yu, Hang
Zhang, Haipeng
Di, Peng
author_facet Zhang, Ying
Yu, Hang
Zhang, Haipeng
Di, Peng
contents Text-rich graphs, which integrate complex structural dependencies with abundant textual information, are ubiquitous yet remain challenging for existing learning paradigms. Conventional methods and even LLM-hybrids compress rich text into static embeddings or summaries before structural reasoning, creating an information bottleneck and detaching updates from the raw content. We argue that in text-rich graphs, the text is not merely a node attribute but the primary medium through which structural relationships are manifested. We introduce RAMP, a Raw-text Anchored Message Passing approach that moves beyond using LLMs as mere feature extractors and instead recasts the LLM itself as a graph-native aggregation operator. RAMP exploits the text-rich nature of the graph via a novel dual-representation scheme: it anchors inference on each node's raw text during each iteration while propagating dynamically optimized messages from neighbors. It further handles both discriminative and generative tasks under a single unified generative formulation. Extensive experiments show that RAMP effectively bridges the gap between graph propagation and deep text reasoning, achieving competitive performance and offering new insights into the role of LLMs as graph kernels for general-purpose graph learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14937
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM as Graph Kernel: Rethinking Message Passing on Text-Rich Graphs
Zhang, Ying
Yu, Hang
Zhang, Haipeng
Di, Peng
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Text-rich graphs, which integrate complex structural dependencies with abundant textual information, are ubiquitous yet remain challenging for existing learning paradigms. Conventional methods and even LLM-hybrids compress rich text into static embeddings or summaries before structural reasoning, creating an information bottleneck and detaching updates from the raw content. We argue that in text-rich graphs, the text is not merely a node attribute but the primary medium through which structural relationships are manifested. We introduce RAMP, a Raw-text Anchored Message Passing approach that moves beyond using LLMs as mere feature extractors and instead recasts the LLM itself as a graph-native aggregation operator. RAMP exploits the text-rich nature of the graph via a novel dual-representation scheme: it anchors inference on each node's raw text during each iteration while propagating dynamically optimized messages from neighbors. It further handles both discriminative and generative tasks under a single unified generative formulation. Extensive experiments show that RAMP effectively bridges the gap between graph propagation and deep text reasoning, achieving competitive performance and offering new insights into the role of LLMs as graph kernels for general-purpose graph learning.
title LLM as Graph Kernel: Rethinking Message Passing on Text-Rich Graphs
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14937