GraphTranslator: Aligning Graph Model to Large Language Model for Open-ended Tasks
Mengmei Zhang, Mingwei Sun, Peng Wang, Shen Fan, Yanhu Mo, Xiaoxiao Xu, Hong Liu, Cheng Yang, Chuan Shi
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, exhibit powerful zero-shot and instruction-following capabilities, have catalyzed a revolutionary transformation across diverse fields, especially for open-ended tasks. While the idea is less explored in the graph domain, despite the availability of numerous powerful graph models (GMs), they are restricted to tasks in a pre-defined form. Although several methods applying LLMs to graphs have been proposed, they fail to simultaneously handle the pre-defined and open-ended tasks, with LLM as a node feature enhancer or as a standalone predictor. To break this dilemma, we propose to bridge the pretrained GM and LLM by a Translator, named GraphTranslator, aiming to leverage GM to handle the pre-defined tasks effectively and utilize the extended interface of LLMs to offer various open-ended tasks for GM. To train such Translator, we propose a Producer capable of constructing the graph-text alignment data along node information, neighbor information and model information. By translating node representation into tokens, GraphTranslator empowers an LLM to make predictions based on language instructions, providing a unified perspective for both pre-defined and open-ended tasks. Extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed GraphTranslator on zero-shot node classification. The graph question answering experiments reveal our GraphTranslator potential across a broad spectrum of open-ended tasks through language instructions. Our code is available at: https://github.com/alibaba/GraphTranslator
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext 49f3cd44-5874-4e7c-948f-7fdf5a91c24aCited by top-tier papers28
- LLMs as Zero-shot Graph Learners: Alignment of GNN Representations with LLM Token EmbeddingsDuo Wang, Yuan Zuo, Fengzhi Li, Junjie WuNeurIPS 2024 · 99 citations
- ChatTS: Aligning Time Series with LLMs via Synthetic Data for Enhanced Understanding and ReasoningZhe Xie, Zeyan Li, Xiao He, Longlong Xu et al.VLDB 2025 · 87 citations
- LightPROF: A Lightweight Reasoning Framework for Large Language Model on Knowledge GraphTu Ao, Yanhua Yu, Yuling Wang, Yang Deng et al.AAAI 2025 · 28 citations
- MLaGA: Multimodal Large Language and Graph AssistantDongzhe Fan, Jiajin Liu, Yi Fang, Djellel Difallah et al.KDD 2026 · 13 citations
- Can Large Language Models Improve the Adversarial Robustness of Graph Neural Networks?Zhongjian Zhang, Xiao Wang, Huichi Zhou, Yue Yu et al.KDD 2025 · 11 citations
Builds on13
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
- Visual Instruction TuningHaotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Qingyang Wu, Yong Jae LeeNeurIPS 2023 · 11,349 citations
- BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language ModelsJunnan Li, Dongxu Li, Silvio Savarese, Steven C. H. HoiICML 2023 · 7,873 citations
- Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on GraphsWeihua Hu, Matthias Fey, Marinka Zitnik, Yuxiao Dong et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 3,935 citations
- Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?Heng Wang, Shangbin Feng, Tianxing He, Zhaoxuan Tan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 420 citations
Related papers
- UniGTE: Unified Graph-Text Encoding for Zero-Shot Generalization across Graph Tasks and DomainsDuo Wang, Yuan Zuo, Guangyue Lu, Junjie WuNeurIPS 2025 · 9 citations
- GraphGPT: Graph Instruction Tuning for Large Language ModelsJiabin Tang, Yuhao Yang, Wei Wei, Lei Shi et al.SIGIR 2024 · 182 citations
- GraphLAMA: Enabling Efficient Adaptation of Graph Language Models with Limited AnnotationsJunze Chen, Cheng Yang, Shujie Li, Zhiqiang Zhang et al.KDD 2025 · 1 citation
- UniGraph: Learning a Unified Cross-Domain Foundation Model for Text-Attributed GraphsYufei He, Yuan Sui, Xiaoxin He, Bryan HooiKDD 2025 · 8 citations
- Bootstrapping Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning via Large Language Models: A Generalized ApproachHang Gao, Chenhao Zhang, Fengge Wu, Changwen Zheng et al.AAAI 2025 · 6 citations
