Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Cross-modal Reinforced Prompting for Graph and Language Tasks

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capability in addressing different graph learning and natural language tasks, respectively. Motivated by this, integrating LLMs with GNNs has been increasingly studied to acquire transferable knowledge across modalities, which leads to improved empirical performance in language and graph domains. However, existing studies mainly focused on a single-domain scenario by designing complicated integration techniques to manage multimodal data effectively. Therefore, a concise and generic learning framework for multi-domain tasks, i.e., graph and language domains, is highly desired yet remains under-exploited due to two major challenges. First, the language corpus of downstream tasks differs significantly from graph data, making it hard to bridge the knowledge gap between modalities. Second, not all knowledge demonstrates immediate benefits for downstream tasks, potentially introducing disruptive noise to context-sensitive models like LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel plug-and-play framework for incorporating a lightweight cross-domain prompting method into both language and graph learning tasks. Specifically, we first convert the textual input into a domain-scalable prompt, which not only preserves the semantic and logical contents of the textual input, but also highlights related graph information as external knowledge for different domains. Then, we develop a reinforcement learning-based method to learn the optimal edge selection strategy for useful knowledge extraction, which profoundly sharpens the multi-domain model capabilities. In addition, we introduce a joint multi-view optimization module to regularize agent-level collaborative learning across two domains. Finally, extensive empirical justifications over 23 public and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our approach can be applied to diverse multi-domain tasks more accurately, robustly, and reasonably, and improve the performances of the state-of-the-art graph and language models in different learning paradigms.