# Efficient Graph Understanding with LLMs via Structured Context Injection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00740/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Selection-Inference: Exploiting Large Language Models for Interpretable Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09712/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03393/) (2023)
- [Transformers as Soft Reasoners over Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05867/) (2020)
- [Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10037/) (2023)
- [Language is All a Graph Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07134/) (2023)
- [Accessing GPT-4 level Mathematical Olympiad Solutions via Monte Carlo Tree Self-refine with LLaMa-3 8B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07394/) (2024)
- [Let Your Graph Do the Talking: Encoding Structured Data for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05862/) (2024)
- [CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False Presuppositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17257/) (2022)
- [ExplaGraphs: An Explanation Graph Generation Task for Structured Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07644/) (2021)
- [Learning Dynamic Belief Graphs to Generalize on Text-Based Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09127/) (2020)
- [Graph-enhanced Large Language Models in Asynchronous Plan Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02805/) (2024)
- [Learning Knowledge Graph-based World Models of Textual Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09608/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Higher-Order Knowledge Representations for Agentic Scientific Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04878/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in solving problems across domains, including graph-related tasks traditionally addressed by symbolic or algorithmic methods. In this work, we present a framework for structured context injection, where task-specific information is systematically embedded in the input to guide LLMs in solving a wide range of graph problems. Our method does not require fine-tuning of LLMs, making it cost-efficient and lightweight. We observe that certain graph reasoning tasks remain challenging for LLMs unless they are mapped to conceptually grounded representations. However, achieving such mappings through fine-tuning or repeated multi-step querying can be expensive and inefficient. Our approach offers a practical alternative by injecting structured context directly into the input, enabling the LLM to implicitly align the task with grounded conceptual spaces. We evaluate the approach on multiple graph tasks using both lightweight and large models, highlighting the trade-offs between accuracy and computational cost. The results demonstrate consistent performance improvements, showing that structured input context can rival or surpass more complex approaches. Our findings underscore the value of structured context injection as an effective and scalable strategy for graph understanding with LLMs.