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:2609.22327v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual graph reasoning requires answering graph-theoretic questions directly from graph images, where graph topology and state are conveyed visually...
By Rongzheng Wang, Zhe Wang, Ke Qin, Rongwei Wang, Muquan Li, Yizhuo Ma, Yihong Huang, Jielei Wang, Shuang Liang
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:2602.11678v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in visual understanding, yet they suffer from a critical limitation: struct...
By Chengwei Ma, Zhen Tian, Zhou Zhou, Zhixian Xu, Xiaowei Zhu, Xia Hua, Si Shi, F. Richard Yu
arXiv:2605.06462v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Progress in graph learning is hindered by benchmark practices that conflate the contributions of node features and graph structure, making it hard...
By Richard von Moos, Mathieu Alain, Bastian Rieck
MVGraph is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large vision‑language models on multi‑graph reasoning tasks where evidence is spread across multiple interrelated visual graph views. It contains 8,000 instances covering eight graph‑theoretic tasks derived from partial and temporal graph scenarios, and each instance is provably unsolvable from a single view. The benchmark also offers 29 diagnostic tasks with 64,000 instances to probe four core capabilities—Perception, Alignment, Composition, and Reasoning—providing golden intermediate representations for detailed analysis.
By Yingjie Zhu, Han Cheng, Xuefeng Bai, Youcheng Pan, Yang Xiang, Kehai Chen
GraphVerse is a new benchmark for multimodal large language models that tests visual graph reasoning by combining perception, graph-based visual inputs, and multi-step reasoning. It introduces Graph-centric Image Editing strategies to actively challenge models while preserving semantics, and offers a VGR-Score metric that evaluates reasoning quality beyond simple answer accuracy. Experiments show current models have limitations in VGR and demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphVerse for broader multimodal reasoning tasks.
By Yuanfu Sun, Yuanhang Ren, Kang Li, Chuanhao Ji, Jiaxi Li, Jiajin Liu, Ninghao Liu, Qiaoyu Tan
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
arXiv:2610.02517v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graph-structured data plays a pivotal role in modeling complex relationships. However, real-world graphs are often incomplete due to data collection an...
By Yu Song, Zhigang Hua, Yan Xie, Bingheng Li, Jingzhe Liu, Bo Long, Jiliang Tang, Hui Liu