# Both Topology and Text Matter: Revisiting LLM-guided Out-of-Distribution Detection on Text-attributed Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11641/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Learning on Large-scale Text-attributed Graphs via Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14709/) (2022)
- [GOOD: A Graph Out-of-Distribution Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08452/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty Aware Semi-Supervised Learning on Graph Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12783/) (2020)
- [Graph Posterior Network: Bayesian Predictive Uncertainty for Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14012/) (2021)
- [SimTeG: A Frustratingly Simple Approach Improves Textual Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02565/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models for Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08011/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04481/) (2022)
- [Augmenting Low-Resource Text Classification with Graph-Grounded Pre-training and Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03324/) (2023)
- [GraphCLIP: Enhancing Transferability in Graph Foundation Models for Text-Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10329/) (2024)
- [Efficient Tuning and Inference for Large Language Models on Textual Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15569/) (2024)
- [Graph Neural Networks: Taxonomy, Advances and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08752/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models for Node Generation in Few-Shot Learning on Text-Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09872/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) associate nodes with textual attributes and graph structure, enabling GNNs to jointly model semantic and structural information. Although effective on in-distribution (ID) data, GNNs often fail on out-of-distribution (OOD) nodes with unseen textual or structural patterns, producing overconfident predictions without reliable OOD detection. Existing topology-driven methods mitigate node-level bias through neighboring structures, but typically encode texts as shallow features, underutilizing semantic information. Recent LLM-based approaches instead synthesize pseudo OOD priors from textual knowledge, yet suffer from two key limitations: (1) a trade-off between reliability and informativeness, where generated OOD exposures either deviate from true OOD semantics or introduce substantial ID noise; and (2) dependence on specialized architectures, limiting compatibility with topology-level advances validated in prior work. To address these issues, we propose LG-Plug, an LLM-Guided Plug-and-play framework for TAG OOD detection. LG-Plug aligns topology and text representations to obtain fine-grained node embeddings, then constructs consensus-driven OOD exposure through clustered iterative LLM prompting. To reduce LLM query cost, it further adopts lightweight in-cluster codebooks and heuristic sampling. The generated OOD exposure acts as a regularizer that separates ID and OOD nodes, enabling seamless integration with existing detectors. Experiments on six TAG benchmarks demonstrate that LG-Plug consistently improves topology-driven OOD detectors (>7% FPR95 reduction) and surpasses prior LLM-based methods (>5% FPR95 reduction).