Kang Li
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2026
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.
AgentGL: Towards Agentic Graph Learning with LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
Yuanfu Sun | Kang Li | Dongzhe Fan | Jiajin Liu | Qiaoyu Tan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuanfu Sun | Kang Li | Dongzhe Fan | Jiajin Liu | Qiaoyu Tan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on agentic capabilities—iterative retrieval, tool use, and decision-making—to overcome the limits of static, parametric knowledge. Yet existing agentic frameworks treat external information as unstructured text and fail to leverage the topological dependencies inherent in real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Agentic Graph Learning (AGL), a paradigm that reframes graph learning as an interleaved process of topology-aware navigation and LLM-based inference. Specifically, we propose AgentGL, the first reinforcement learning (RL)–driven framework for AGL. AgentGL equips an LLM agent with graph-native tools for multi-scale exploration, regulates tool usage via search-constrained thinking to balance accuracy and efficiency, and employs a graph-conditioned curriculum RL strategy to stabilize long-horizon policy learning without step-wise supervision. Across diverse Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) benchmarks and multiple LLM backbones, AgentGL substantially outperforms strong GraphLLMs and GraphRAG baselines, achieving absolute improvements of up to 17.5% in node classification and 28.4% in link prediction. These results demonstrate that AGL is a promising frontier for enabling LLMs to autonomously navigate and reason over complex relational environments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/AgentGL.