Chuanhao Ji
Author directory2026
GraphRAG-Router: Learning Cost-Efficient Routing over GraphRAGs and LLMs with Reinforcement Learning
Dongzhe Fan | Chuanhao Ji | Zimu Wang | Tong Chen | Qiaoyu Tan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Dongzhe Fan | Chuanhao Ji | Zimu Wang | Tong Chen | Qiaoyu Tan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for knowledge-intensive question answering, especially for tasks that require structured evidence organization and multi-hop reasoning. However, existing GraphRAG systems are typically built in a one-size-fits-all manner, relying on a fixed retrieval framework and a single, often large and costly, generator LLM for all queries. This static design limits their ability to adapt to the complexity of varying questions and often incurs unnecessary computational cost. To fill in the gap, we propose GraphRAG-Router, a cost-efficient framework that adopts a hierarchical routing strategy to coordinate heterogeneous GraphRAGs and generator LLMs. Specifically, GraphRAG-Router is first warmed up through supervised fine-tuning and then optimized with a two-stage reinforcement learning procedure, whose second stage introduces a curriculum cost-aware reward to encourage difficulty-aware and economical generator allocation. Extensive experiments on six general-domain and multi-hop QA benchmarks show that GraphRAG-Router consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing the overuse of large LLMs by nearly 30% while maintaining strong generalization capability.
GraphVerse: A Comprehensive Visual Graph Reasoning Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models
Yuanfu Sun | Yuanhang Ren | Kang Li | Chuanhao Ji | Jiaxi Li | Jiajin Liu | Ninghao Liu | Qiaoyu Tan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuanfu Sun | Yuanhang Ren | Kang Li | Chuanhao Ji | Jiaxi Li | Jiajin Liu | Ninghao Liu | Qiaoyu Tan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across diverse vision-language tasks, creating an urgent need for more challenging benchmarks. Yet existing evaluations still provide limited insight into whether these models can truly reason over structured visual information. Visual Graph Reasoning (VGR) offers a compelling testbed for this challenge, requiring models to integrate perception, structural understanding, and multi-step reasoning over graph-based visual inputs. However, prior VGR benchmarks often reduce the task to visual perception followed by text-based reasoning, restrict evaluation to single-image settings, rely on answer-only metrics, and underrepresent realistic graph-centric scenarios. To bridge the gap, we introduce GraphVerse, a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates perception, visual reasoning, and text-based graph reasoning in MLLMs under both single-image and paired-image settings. At its core is a suite of Graph-centric Image Editing (GIE) strategies that modify graph images while preserving their semantics, turning them into active tests of visual reasoning. We further propose VGR-Score, a process-sensitive metric that evaluates reasoning quality beyond final-answer accuracy. Extensive experiments reveal several key limitations of current MLLMs in VGR, while also validating the effectiveness of GIE strategies and the transferability of GraphVerse to broader multimodal reasoning capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/GraphVerse.