The survey titled "When Vision Meets Graphs: A Survey on Graph Reasoning and Learning" reviews how visual depictions of graphs can be used as inputs for graph reasoning and learning. It highlights that while Graph Neural Networks dominate graph machine learning, most pipelines ignore the visual form of graphs, despite scientists routinely interpreting graphs visually. The paper organizes existing work into three threads—vision for graph reasoning, vision for graph learning, and scientific graphs—aiming to clarify current capabilities and chart a path toward foundation models that perceive and reason about graphs like scientists do.
By Xinjian Zhao, Wei Pang, Zhixuan Yu, Xiangru Jian, Xiaozhuang Song, Yaoyao Xu, Zhongkai Xue, Dingshuo Chen, Shu Wu, Philip Torr, Tianshu Yu
arXiv:2607. 19128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) provide a unified representation space for textual and visual information, yet their potential as general-purpose backbones for graph-structured data remains largely unexplored.
By Jiayi Yang, Yifang Chen, Yuanfu Sun, Jiajin Liu, Qiaoyu Tan
arXiv:2607. 01982v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using molecular large language models (LLMs) as a unified framework for understanding molecular structures and functions is emerging as a new trend in tasks such as molecular design and drug discovery.
By Wenda Wang, Yihan Tong, Yuwei Hu, Zhewei Wei
arXiv:2510. 09416v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning on temporal graphs has become a central topic in graph representation learning, with numerous benchmarks indicating the strong performance of state-of-the-art models.
By Abigail J. Hayes, Tobias Schumacher, Markus Strohmaier
arXiv:2502. 16533v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated a strong capability in modeling graph structures by addressing the intrinsic limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), such as over-smoothing and over-squashing.
By Chaohao Yuan, Kangfei Zhao, Ercan Engin Kuruoglu, Liang Wang, Tingyang Xu, Wenbing Huang, Deli Zhao, Hong Cheng, Yu Rong
arXiv:2609.08152v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graph representation learning has largely focused on designing increasingly sophisticated models to transform graph topology into vector representation...
By Meng Qin, Jinqiang Cui, Hongwei Zheng, Weihua Li, Sen Pei
Deep learning models have emerged in machine learning and related fields, demonstrating astonishing performance in various visual tasks. Despite their great success, however, these models are unable to fully encode intrinsic visual structures, and often ignore the spatial, topological, and semantic information contained within an image.
arXiv:2608.21825v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Learning adjacency matrices from node-link images is a fundamental problem for recovering structured graph information from visual observations. Existi...
By Jiahao Xie, Guangmo Tong
The paper introduces TopoBench-180, a human‑verified benchmark of 180 structural diagrams with canonical graph annotations, and TopoAgent, a perception‑to‑reasoning framework that extracts graph topology from diagrams using large vision‑language models. TopoAgent combines grounded perception, global structural priors, node inventory construction, local‑to‑global relation reasoning, and consistency enforcement to progressively build the target graph. Experiments demonstrate that TopoAgent surpasses strong baselines, particularly in edge extraction, thereby advancing multimodal structured understanding for diagram‑to‑graph tasks.
By Bangwei Guo, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Shengyu Chen, Dongyue Li, Masaharu Morimoto, Takayuki Kuroda, Dimitris Metaxas, Haifeng Chen
The article reviews the problem of learning graph structures from data, noting that research has traditionally split into two paths: inferring the topology of a single graph from observations on it, and learning a generative distribution from multiple observed graphs to sample new ones. It proposes a unified framework that treats both as inverse problems of a common graph generation process, reviews key methods, and discusses their interrelations, strengths, and limitations. The review highlights opportunities for cross‑paradigm integration and outlines future research directions.
By Xiaowen Dong, Hoi-To Wai, Siheng Chen, Laura Toni, Dorina Thanou
arXiv:2609.07961v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graph modeling, a crucial task for representing complex relationships in graph-structured data, has achieved significant success in recent years. Howev...
By Thanh-Dat Truong, Sarah Alharbi, Susan Gauch, Xinghui Zhao, Marios Savvides, Khoa Luu
The paper demonstrates that high‑quality graph embeddings can be produced without complex models or training by propagating random features through topological structures derived from random walks and anonymous walks. These training‑free embeddings capture node proximity and structural roles, respectively, and perform competitively on node, edge, and graph tasks while often requiring less computation. Combining the two embedding types further improves inference quality for some tasks.