GNN-CB: A Graph Neural Network Competition Benchmark for Human and LLM Evaluation

Murad Hossen, Tasneem Selim, Gurur Gamgam, Tuga Yousif, Abderrahmane Kasmi, Ikram Aissiou, Mubaraq Onipede, Faran Taimoor Butt, Sanae Zrigui, Rosa Y. G. Paccotacya-Yanque, Ignatius Balayo, Ikram Elhouiti, Hadil Affes, Bijay Adhikari, Sargam Goyal, Muhammad Ibrahim Isah, Mohammad Idrees Bhat, Samuel Kangoni Matia, Peguy Kem-Meka Tiotsop Kadzue, Maha Trabelsi, Emmanuel Owusu, Vinit, Nour Majdoub, Tamiru Alemnew, Islem Rekik

Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on coding and reasoning benchmarks; however, their ability to solve graph-structured machine learning problems remains largely unexplored. In particular, no benchmark currently evaluates whether LLMs can autonomously solve end-to-end Graph Neural Network (GNN) coding tasks under realistic competition settings. To address this gap, this paper introduces GNN-CB, the first competition-based benchmark for evaluating both humans and LLMs on GNN coding tasks. GNN-CB consists of 18 curated competitions spanning node-, edge-, and graph-level prediction across diverse graph categories, domains, and difficulty tiers. All submissions are evaluated through a unified automated pipeline with hidden test sets and standardized scoring. Human participants solve tasks under controlled competition constraints, while LLMs are evaluated using a frozen zero-shot prompting protocol based on a plan-then-code paradigm with bounded execute-and-repair loops. The benchmark additionally supports both non-agent and autonomous agent-based evaluation within the same protocol. Under our evaluated protocol, LLMs rarely match Human Top performance and show less stable performance across competitions. No single model dominates: a few competitions are won by LLMs, yet humans still hold the top score on most tasks. We release GNN-CB as a living benchmark with automated evaluation infrastructure, dynamic leaderboards, and reproducible execution pipelines. Beyond benchmarking, GNN-CB provides a practice-oriented resource for studying GNN implementation across progressively diverse graph-learning tasks. The benchmark and evaluation framework are publicly available at https://basiralab.github.io/GNN-CB/.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1762
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
40160–40188
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1762/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Murad Hossen, Tasneem Selim, Gurur Gamgam, Tuga Yousif, Abderrahmane Kasmi, Ikram Aissiou, Mubaraq Onipede, Faran Taimoor Butt, Sanae Zrigui, Rosa Y. G. Paccotacya-Yanque, Ignatius Balayo, Ikram Elhouiti, Hadil Affes, Bijay Adhikari, Sargam Goyal, Muhammad Ibrahim Isah, Mohammad Idrees Bhat, Samuel Kangoni Matia, Peguy Kem-Meka Tiotsop Kadzue, Maha Trabelsi, Emmanuel Owusu, Vinit, Nour Majdoub, Tamiru Alemnew, and Islem Rekik. 2026. GNN-CB: A Graph Neural Network Competition Benchmark for Human and LLM Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 40160–40188, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GNN-CB: A Graph Neural Network Competition Benchmark for Human and LLM Evaluation (Hossen et al., EMNLP 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1762.pdf
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