This survey examines how these methods integrate graphs into various stages of the LLM pipeline, including the input, model, and output phases, and outlines the challenges and future research directions for developing more efficient and interpretable solutions.
This work presents the first systematic study of inverse relation directionality in LLMs, using a benchmark consisting of 5,457 instances spanning 27 distinct inverse relation labels and reveals systematic asymmetries in inverse relation classification across LLMs.
Relational databases (RDBs) play an essential role in real-world scenarios, such as e-commerce, social media, and industry. Recently, with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), using LLMs to exploit RDBs has become a significant trend. Plenty of works have been proposed to use natural language to describe RDBs or use graph neural networks~(GNNs) to embed relations in RDBs before applying LLMs to them. Despite the achieved progress, existing works still suffer from inevitable weaknesses. For one thing, using natural language to describe RDBs not only causes excessive context length, but also leads to the loss of critical structural information. For another, using GNNs to capture complex structural dependencies requires extensive human-labeled data for supervised fine-tuning, limiting their scalability. Therefore, one important question remains unsolved: '' How to leverage the capability of LLMs to realize robust relational reasoning in RDBs? '' In response, we propose a novel self-supervised framework (ZeroRel) for relational reasoning over RDBs. ZeroRel treats context sparsity as a controllable curriculum variable and leverages it to induce a progressive shift from semantic-dominant inference to structure-aware relational reasoning. Specifically, ZeroRel contains two key modules: Graph-guided Prompt Alignment (GrPA) and Progressive Sparsity-based Context Refinement (PSCR). GrPA uses a heterogeneous GNN to encode multi-table relational structures and projects the resulting structural embeddings into the semantic space of LLMs. PSCR gradually reduces visible attribute context and acts as an information bottleneck, forcing the model to internalize cross-table dependencies rather than relying on superficial semantic shortcuts. Finally, extensive experiments over 7 datasets and 12 downstream tasks demonstrate the superiority of ZeroRel. Furthermore, ZeroRel trained without any task-specific labels achieves an average improvement of 6.24% over models trained with supervised labels.
Yujie Tian, Kun Zhang, Qiuyuan Li et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
Hybrid queries—natural language questions over structured data that require both database capabilities and LLM reasoning—have recently emerged as a prominent research topic. However, existing solutions remain overly dependent on manual workflows, and current benchmarks are limited in scale and diversity. To bridge this gap, we present (1) HyQBench \xspace, a large-scale benchmark with 60\sim 90× more queries than prior work, built on 3× more databases; (2) AutoHyQ \xspace, an automated pipeline that can execute existing methods without manual intervention; (3) multi-dimensional, fine-grained evaluation metrics for comprehensive assessment. Through extensive experiments across multiple hybrid query approaches on diverse LLM backbones, we reveal their strengths and limitations, and identify research opportunities for advancing this emerging field. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/XMUDM/HyQBench.
Bo Li, Chenzhan Wang, Long-Kang Lin et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
This survey presents a systematic review of 121 references spanning 2002 to 2026, tracing the evolution of TextRank-based approaches into hybrid LLM pipelines and advancing three qualified arguments.
Ahmed J. Jabur, Asmaa Abdul Azeez Dakhil, Israa Saad Mohammed et al.· Iraqi Journal for Computers...· 0 citations
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, making it difficult to understand, predict, or control their behavior. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, this lack of transparency raises serious concerns about reliability and safety. Mechanistic interpretability (MI) has emerged as a promising approach to address this challenge, seeking to reverse-engineer the internal computations of LLMs into human-understandable mechanisms, i.e., an approximate high-level algorithm that the LLM implements with a subset of its components (a circuit) to complete a certain language task or exhibit a certain behavior. This tutorial provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of LLM mechanism discovery, validation, and editing. We begin by introducing foundational concepts, including features, components, computational graphs, and circuits, along with key notation. We then examine mechanism discovery through four methodological families: causal mediation, attribution, sparse decomposition, and optimization-based approaches. Next, we turn to mechanism validation, covering methods for verifying proposed mechanisms and emerging standards for rigorous evaluation. Building on these foundations, we survey mechanistic editing techniques that leverage MI insights to modify behavior at varying granularity, from fine-grained representation-level steering to coarser circuit-level interventions. Lastly, we outline open challenges and future research directions, including scalability of interpretability methods, evaluation benchmarks for mechanistic circuits, and the integration of interpretability with training-time objectives, aiming to inspire continued progress in understanding and governing large language models.
Yinhan He, Wendy Zheng, Tianyi Zhao et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
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