Surveys remain the primary way researchers grasp the lineage of methods within an AI subfield, but they scale poorly against the current rate of publication. Existing taxonomy-induction methods are largely leaf-bound and time-agnostic; they tend to force transitional papers into mature leaves and can create topological inversions between ancestors and descendants. We propose EvoTree, a staged framework that decouples conceptual backbone learning from temporal refinement: a graph-aware encoder with distribution-based hierarchical clustering yields a stable taxonomy backbone; temporal fine-tuning then re-attaches marginal papers to internal nodes under monotonic-path constraints; a final LLM pass labels concepts without altering the topology. We release the first annotated benchmark for this task across 11 AI subfields. EvoTree improves Leaf Purity and Path Monotonicity Rate over the strongest taxonomy-induction baseline, and is the only method with non-trivial marginal-paper detection on the annotated set.

Naive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) focuses on individual documents during retrieval and, as a result, falls short in handling networked documents which are very popular in many applications such as citation graphs, social media, and knowledge graphs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GRAG), which tackles the fundamental challenges in retrieving textual subgraphs and integrating the joint textual and topological information into Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance its generation. To enable efficient textual subgraph retrieval, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer strategy that retrieves the optimal subgraph structure in linear time. To achieve graph context-aware generation, incorporate textual graphs into LLMs through two complementary views—the text view and the graph view—enabling LLMs to more effectively comprehend and utilize the graph context. Extensive experiments on graph reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that in scenarios requiring multi-hop reasoning on textual graphs, our GRAG approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art RAG methods. Our datasets as well as codes of GRAG are available at https://github.com/HuieL/GRAG.

Graph representation learning has garnered significant attention due to its broad applications in various domains, such as recommendation systems and social network analysis. Despite advancements in graph learning methods, challenges still remain in explainability when graphs are associated with semantic features. In this paper, we present GraphNarrator, the first method designed to generate natural language explanations for Graph Neural Networks. GraphNarrator employs a generative language model that maps input-output pairs to explanations reflecting the model’s decision-making process. To address the lack of ground truth explanations to train the model, we propose first generating pseudo-labels that capture the model’s decisions from saliency-based explanations, then using Expert Iteration to iteratively train the pseudo-label generator based on training objectives on explanation quality. The high-quality pseudo-labels are finally utilized to train an end-to-end explanation generator model. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphNarrator in producing faithful, concise, and human-preferred natural language explanations.

The deployment and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by their memory inefficiency, computational demands, and the high costs of API inferences. Traditional distillation methods, which transfer the capabilities of LLMs to smaller models, often fail to determine whether the knowledge has been sufficiently transferred, potentially resulting in high costs or incomplete distillation. In this paper, we propose an Explanation-Guided LLMs Active Distillation (ELAD) framework that employs an active learning strategy to optimize the balance between annotation costs and model performance. To improve the efficiency of sample selection, we introduce an explanation-guided sample selection method that identifies samples challenging its reasoning by exploiting uncertainties in reasoning explanation steps. Additionally, we present a customized LLM-annotated explanation revision technique where the teacher model detects and corrects flaws in the student model’s reasoning. Our experiments across various reasoning datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the efficiency of LLMs knowledge distillation.