# UniGTE: Unified Graph-Text Encoding for Zero-Shot Generalization across Graph Tasks and Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16885/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [MoleculeNet: A Benchmark for Molecular Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00564/) (2017)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning Automated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07594/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03393/) (2023)
- [Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10037/) (2023)
- [One for All: Towards Training One Graph Model for All Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00149/) (2023)
- [GraphGPT: Graph Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13023/) (2023)
- [Language is All a Graph Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07134/) (2023)
- [GPT4Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand Graph Structured Data ? An Empirical Evaluation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15066/) (2023)
- [LLaGA: Large Language and Graph Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08170/) (2024)
- [GraphPrompt: Unifying Pre-Training and Downstream Tasks for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08043/) (2023)
- [All in One: Multi-task Prompting for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01504/) (2023)
- [Harnessing Explanations: LLM-to-LM Interpreter for Enhanced Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19523/) (2023)
- [GraphMAE2: A Decoding-Enhanced Masked Self-Supervised Graph Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04779/) (2023)
- [ZeroG: Investigating Cross-dataset Zero-shot Transferability in Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11235/) (2024)
- [OpenGraph: Towards Open Graph Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01121/) (2024)
- [Label-free Node Classification on Graphs with Large Language Models (LLMS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04668/) (2023)
- [GraphTranslator: Aligning Graph Model to Large Language Model for Open-ended Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07197/) (2024)
- [Augmenting Low-Resource Text Classification with Graph-Grounded Pre-training and Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03324/) (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)
- [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)
- [Multi-task Self-supervised Graph Neural Networks Enable Stronger Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02016/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Revisiting Graph-Tokenizing Large Language Models: A Systematic Evaluation of Graph Token Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03514/) (2026)
- [Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Adaptive Subgraph Denoising for Zero-Shot Graph Learning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02938/) (2026)
- [Enhancing LLMs for Graph Tasks via Graph-aware LoRA Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22429/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Recurrent Message Passing for Test Time Computing on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22462/) (2026)
- [A Unified Graph Language Model for Multi-Domain Multi-Task Graph Alignment Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12197/) (2026)
- [GraphReview: Scientific Paper Evaluation via LLM-based Graph Evidence Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27204/) (2026)
- [ZeroGAR: Benchmarking the Adversarial Robustness of Zero-Shot Graph Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33314/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalizing to unseen graph tasks without task-specific supervision is challenging: conventional graph neural networks are typically tied to a fixed label space, while large language models (LLMs) struggle to capture graph structure. We introduce UniGTE, an instruction-tuned encoder-decoder framework that unifies structural and semantic reasoning. The encoder augments a pretrained autoregressive LLM with learnable alignment tokens and a structure-aware graph-text attention mechanism, enabling it to attend jointly to a tokenized graph and a natural-language task prompt while remaining permutation-invariant to node order. This yields compact, task-aware graph representations. Conditioned solely on these representations, a frozen LLM decoder predicts and reconstructs: it outputs the task answer and simultaneously paraphrases the input graph in natural language. The reconstruction objective regularizes the encoder to preserve structural cues. UniGTE is instruction-tuned on five datasets spanning node-level, edge-level, and graph-level tasks across diverse domains, yet requires no fine-tuning at inference. It achieves new state-of-the-art zero-shot results on node classification, link prediction, graph classification, and graph regression under cross-task and cross-domain settings, demonstrating that tight integration of graph structure with LLM semantics enables robust, transferable graph reasoning.