# An Automatic Graph Construction Framework based on Large Language Models for Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18241 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18241/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Routing Between Capsules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09829/) (2017)
- [Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08302/) (2023)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00388/) (2020)
- [Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06978/) (2017)
- [KGAT: Knowledge Graph Attention Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07854/) (2019)
- [TALLRec: An Effective and Efficient Tuning Framework to Align Large Language Model with Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00447/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10783/) (2020)
- [ChatIE: Zero-Shot Information Extraction via Chatting with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10205/) (2023)
- [LLMRec: Large Language Models with Graph Augmentation for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00423/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems: Challenges, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12843/) (2021)
- [How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05817/) (2023)
- [RippleNet: Propagating User Preferences on the Knowledge Graph for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03467/) (2018)
- [PanGu-α: Large-scale Autoregressive Pretrained Chinese Language Models with Auto-parallel Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12369/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10730/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Enhancing LLM Reliability via Explicit Knowledge Boundary Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02233/) (2025)
- [Graph Foundation Models for Recommendation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08346/) (2025)
- [OSCAR: Optimization-Steered Agentic Planning for Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08603/) (2026)
- [DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12245/) (2026)
- [Weaving Visual Narratives: Agentic Image Bundle Composition Beyond Atomic Visual Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28695/) (2026)
- [Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13344/) (2025)
- [LLM-driven Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05474/) (2026)
- [Reviewing the Reviewer: Graph-Enhanced LLMs for E-commerce Appeal Adjudication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19267/) (2026)
- [No-Free-Graph: Learning When Multimodal Data Should Be Graphified](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02768/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as state-of-the-art methods to learn from graph-structured data for recommendation. However, most existing GNN-based recommendation methods focus on the optimization of model structures and learning strategies based on pre-defined graphs, neglecting the importance of the graph construction stage. Earlier works for graph construction usually rely on speciffic rules or crowdsourcing, which are either too simplistic or too labor-intensive. Recent works start to utilize large language models (LLMs) to automate the graph construction, in view of their abundant open-world knowledge and remarkable reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, they generally suffer from two limitations: (1) invisibility of global view (e.g., overlooking contextual information) and (2) construction inefficiency. To this end, we introduce AutoGraph, an automatic graph construction framework based on LLMs for recommendation. Specifically, we first use LLMs to infer the user preference and item knowledge, which is encoded as semantic vectors. Next, we employ vector quantization to extract the latent factors from the semantic vectors. The latent factors are then incorporated as extra nodes to link the user/item nodes, resulting in a graph with in-depth global-view semantics. We further design metapath-based message aggregation to effectively aggregate the semantic and collaborative information. The framework is model-agnostic and compatible with different backbone models. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy and efffciency of AutoGraph compared to existing baseline methods. We have deployed AutoGraph in Huawei advertising platform, and gain a 2.69% improvement on RPM and a 7.31% improvement on eCPM in the online A/B test. Currently AutoGraph has been used as the main trafffc model, serving hundreds of millions of people.