# Harnessing Explanations: LLM-to-LM Interpreter for Enhanced Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19523/

## Key facts

- Cited by 133 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [GPT-GNN: Generative Pre-Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15437/) (2020)
- [Black-Box Tuning for Language-Model-as-a-Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03514/) (2022)
- [Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10037/) (2023)
- [GPT4Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand Graph Structured Data ? An Empirical Evaluation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15066/) (2023)
- [GreaseLM: Graph REASoning Enhanced Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08860/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 133)

- [G-Retriever: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07630/) (2024)
- [LLaGA: Large Language and Graph Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08170/) (2024)
- [Graph Foundation Models: Concepts, Opportunities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11829/) (2023)
- [Position: Graph Foundation Models are Already Here](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02216/) (2024)
- [GRAG: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16506/) (2024)
- [Fake News in Sheep's Clothing: Robust Fake News Detection Against LLM-Empowered Style Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10830/) (2023)
- [LLMs as Zero-shot Graph Learners: Alignment of GNN Representations with LLM Token Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14512/) (2024)
- [GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09709/) (2024)
- [Griffin: Towards a Graph-Centric Relational Database Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05568/) (2025)
- [Text-space Graph Foundation Models: Comprehensive Benchmarks and New Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10727/) (2024)
- [Can Graph Learning Improve Planning in LLM-based Agents?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19119/) (2024)
- [GLBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07457/) (2024)
- [GITA: Graph to Visual and Textual Integration for Vision-Language Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02130/) (2024)
- [KnowPhish: Large Language Models Meet Multimodal Knowledge Graphs for Enhancing Reference-Based Phishing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02253/) (2024)
- [Graph Machine Learning in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14928/) (2024)
- [GraphWiz: An Instruction-Following Language Model for Graph Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16029/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models as Topological Structure Enhancers for Text-Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14324/) (2023)
- [DTGB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12072/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Improve the Adversarial Robustness of Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08685/) (2024)
- [LLM as GNN: Graph Vocabulary Learning for Text-Attributed Graph Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03313/) (2025)
- [When Do LLMs Help With Node Classification? A Comprehensive Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00829/) (2025)
- [Graph Meets LLMs: Towards Large Graph Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14522/) (2023)
- [Graph-oriented Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models for Generic Graph Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04780/) (2024)
- [Learning Graph Quantized Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13798/) (2024)
- [GraphMaster: Automated Graph Synthesis via LLM Agents in Data-Limited Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00711/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models on Generative Graph Analytics: Query, Learning, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14809/) (2024)
- [LLM and GNN are Complementary: Distilling LLM for Multimodal Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01032/) (2024)
- [Graph4MM: Weaving Multimodal Learning with Structural Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16990/) (2025)
- [GraphAlign: Pretraining One Graph Neural Network on Multiple Graphs via Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02953/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Learning from Graphs with Heterophily: Recent Advances and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09769/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) has become a critical research problem in recent years. A typical example of a TAG is a paper citation graph, where the text of each paper serves as node attributes. Initial graph neural network (GNN) pipelines handled these text attributes by transforming them into shallow or hand-crafted features, such as skip-gram or bag-of-words features. Recent efforts have focused on enhancing these pipelines with language models (LMs), which typically demand intricate designs and substantial computational resources. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs) such as GPT or Llama2, which demonstrate an ability to reason and to utilize general knowledge, there is a growing need for techniques which combine the textual modelling abilities of LLMs with the structural learning capabilities of GNNs. Hence, in this work, we focus on leveraging LLMs to capture textual information as features, which can be used to boost GNN performance on downstream tasks. A key innovation is our use of explanations as features: we prompt an LLM to perform zero-shot classification, request textual explanations for its decision-making process, and design an LLM-to-LM interpreter to translate these explanations into informative features for downstream GNNs. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on well-established TAG datasets, including Cora, PubMed, ogbn-arxiv, as well as our newly introduced dataset, tape-arxiv23. Furthermore, our method significantly speeds up training, achieving a 2.88 times improvement over the closest baseline on ogbn-arxiv. Lastly, we believe the versatility of the proposed method extends beyond TAGs and holds the potential to enhance other tasks involving graph-text data. Our codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/XiaoxinHe/TAPE.