Beyond Graphs: Can Large Language Models Comprehend Hypergraphs?

Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2025 (ICLR 2025) Conference

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Yifan Feng, Chengwu Yang, Xingliang Hou, Shaoyi Du, Shihui Ying, Zongze Wu, Yue Gao

Abstract

Existing benchmarks like NLGraph and GraphQA evaluate LLMs on graphs by focusing mainly on pairwise relationships, overlooking the high-order correlations found in real-world data. Hypergraphs, which can model complex beyond-pairwise relationships, offer a more robust framework but are still underexplored in the context of LLMs. To address this gap, we introduce LLM4Hypergraph, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 21,500 problems across eight low-order, five high-order, and two isomorphism tasks, utilizing both synthetic and real-world hypergraphs from citation networks and protein structures. We evaluate six prominent LLMs, including GPT-4o, demonstrating our benchmark’s effectiveness in identifying model strengths and weaknesses. Our specialized prompt- ing framework incorporates seven hypergraph languages and introduces two novel techniques, Hyper-BAG and Hyper-COT, which enhance high-order reasoning and achieve an average 4% (up to 9%) performance improvement on structure classification tasks. This work establishes a foundational testbed for integrating hypergraph computational capabilities into LLMs, advancing their comprehension.