Harnessing the Synergy between LLM Agents and Knowledge Graphs for Urban Socioeconomic Prediction

Socioeconomic prediction aims to leverage various urban data to predict the socioeconomic indicators of regions such as population and commercial activity level, which plays an important role in understanding urban regions and supporting decision-making. Existing studies leverage knowledge graphs (KG) to model heterogeneous urban data, and further apply graph representation learning methods for socioeconomic prediction. However, these approaches heavily rely on heuristic ideas and expertise to extract task-relevant knowledge from diverse data, which may not be optimal for specific tasks. Additionally, they tend to overlook the inherent relationships between different indicators, limiting the prediction accuracy. Motivated by the remarkable abilities of large language models (LLMs), in this work, we propose a synergistic framework of LLM agents and KG, which integrates the reasoning and representation learning on KG with LLM agents. We first construct an urban knowledge graph (UrbanKG) to model multi-sourced urban data and finetune an embedding language model to generate embeddings for KG entities with semantic information. Then we leverage the reasoning power of LLM to identify relevant meta-paths in the UrbanKG for each type of socioeconomic prediction task, and design a semantic-guided attention module for knowledge fusion with meta-paths. Moreover, we introduce a cross-task communication mechanism to further enhance performance by enabling knowledge sharing across tasks at both LLM agent and KG levels. On the one hand, the LLM agents for different tasks collaborate to generate more diverse and comprehensive meta-paths. On the other hand, the embeddings from different tasks are adaptively merged. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the synergistic design between LLM and KG, providing insights for information sharing across socioeconomic prediction tasks.