Unified Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Complex Graph Reasoning in Large Language Models
On the map: LLM reasoning → Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Graph reasoning provides a promising testbed for evaluating the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), as graph instances can be programmatically generated, structurally controlled, and naturally scaled to long-input settings. However, existing graph reasoning benchmarks have limited coverage of data complexity, rely heavily on manual construction, and lack unified evaluation across text-based and code-based reasoning modes. To address these limitations, we propose dataset, a five-stage textitsemi-automatic framework for constructing complex graph reasoning benchmarks. It expands benchmark coverage along five dimensions: textitGraph Size, textitTask Complexity, textitTask Description, textitGraph Loading, and textitTask Source. The framework uses an LLM-based data generator to automatically produce task descriptions, graph data, reference solutions, graph-loading scripts, question forms, and evaluation scripts, while retaining human validation at key quality-control stages. Based on it, we construct a benchmark with 202 tasks and evaluate LLMs under text-based, code-based, and augmented reasoning settings. Experiments show that the complexity dimensions reveal model limitations that are less visible in existing benchmarks; existing fine-tuned models struggle to generalize to GraphGym, whereas retrieval-augmented methods show scenario-dependent adaptability, improving textual reasoning but not consistently improving coding reasoning. These findings suggest that ours serves as a challenging and diagnostic benchmark for graph reasoning and provides empirical guidance for future enhancement methods. Code and dataset will be published soon.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 16 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2026.
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- 2025Rethinking and Benchmarking Large Language Models for Graph Reasoning29 Sep
- 2024CodeGraph: Enhancing Graph Reasoning of LLMs with Code25 Aug
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