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Main Authors: Wang, Hongtao, Yang, Renchi, Zheng, Haoran, Ke, Xiangyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25814
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author Wang, Hongtao
Yang, Renchi
Zheng, Haoran
Ke, Xiangyu
author_facet Wang, Hongtao
Yang, Renchi
Zheng, Haoran
Ke, Xiangyu
contents Dirty entity resolution (ER), which identifies records referring to the same real-world entity from a single, messy dataset, is a fundamental task in data management and mining. However, the dominant blocking-matching-clustering paradigm for ER suffers from critical flaws. Its cascaded, decoupled workflow essentially produces a static, sparse graph plagued by missing edges (due to blocking failures) and noisy links (due to matching errors), causing error propagation and yielding suboptimal clusters, particularly when rigid transitivity is imposed in the clustering. We contend that matching and clustering are fundamentally synergistic, both optimizing for the construction of an ideal entity graph. Building upon this insight, we propose Alper, a unified framework that integrates these steps into an iterative probabilistic label propagation process over a global, evolving graph. Unlike disjoint blocking, Alper refines the graph structure and labels dynamically by adaptively integrating "weak but cheap" signals from graph propagation with "strong but expensive" LLM-based pairwise queries. For higher cost-effectiveness, we formulate the signal selection as a constrained optimization problem maximizing cumulative marginal gain under a query budget, solved via our greedy algorithm with provable theoretical guarantees. Our extensive experiments over eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that Alper is consistently superior to state-of-the-art cascaded pipelines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_25814
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive Graph Refinement and Label Propagation with LLMs for Cost-Effective Entity Resolution
Wang, Hongtao
Yang, Renchi
Zheng, Haoran
Ke, Xiangyu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Dirty entity resolution (ER), which identifies records referring to the same real-world entity from a single, messy dataset, is a fundamental task in data management and mining. However, the dominant blocking-matching-clustering paradigm for ER suffers from critical flaws. Its cascaded, decoupled workflow essentially produces a static, sparse graph plagued by missing edges (due to blocking failures) and noisy links (due to matching errors), causing error propagation and yielding suboptimal clusters, particularly when rigid transitivity is imposed in the clustering. We contend that matching and clustering are fundamentally synergistic, both optimizing for the construction of an ideal entity graph. Building upon this insight, we propose Alper, a unified framework that integrates these steps into an iterative probabilistic label propagation process over a global, evolving graph. Unlike disjoint blocking, Alper refines the graph structure and labels dynamically by adaptively integrating "weak but cheap" signals from graph propagation with "strong but expensive" LLM-based pairwise queries. For higher cost-effectiveness, we formulate the signal selection as a constrained optimization problem maximizing cumulative marginal gain under a query budget, solved via our greedy algorithm with provable theoretical guarantees. Our extensive experiments over eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that Alper is consistently superior to state-of-the-art cascaded pipelines.
title Adaptive Graph Refinement and Label Propagation with LLMs for Cost-Effective Entity Resolution
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25814