A Survey of Quantized Graph Representation Learning: Connecting Graph Structures with Large Language Models

Qika Lin, Zhen Peng, Kaize Shi, Kai He, Yiming Xu, Jian Zhang, Erik Cambria, Mengling Feng


Abstract
Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in graph representation learning, with the continuous embedding approach emerging as the dominant paradigm. However, such methods encounter issues regarding parameter efficiency, interpretability, and robustness. Thus, Quantized Graph Representation (QGR) learning has recently gained increasing interest, which represents the graph structure with discrete codes instead of conventional continuous embeddings. Given its analogous representation form to natural language, QGR also possesses the capability to seamlessly integrate graph structures with large language models (LLMs). As this emerging paradigm is still in its infancy yet holds significant promise, we undertake this thorough survey to promote its rapid future prosperity. We first present the background of the general quantization methods and their merits. Moreover, we provide an in-depth demonstration of current QGR studies from the perspectives of quantized strategies, training objectives, distinctive designs, knowledge graph quantization, and applications. We further explore the strategies for code dependence learning and integration with LLMs. At last, we give discussions and conclude future directions, aiming to provide a comprehensive picture of QGR and inspire future research.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.135
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2765–2778
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.135/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qika Lin, Zhen Peng, Kaize Shi, Kai He, Yiming Xu, Jian Zhang, Erik Cambria, and Mengling Feng. 2026. A Survey of Quantized Graph Representation Learning: Connecting Graph Structures with Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 2765–2778, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Survey of Quantized Graph Representation Learning: Connecting Graph Structures with Large Language Models (Lin et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.135.pdf