GABench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agents on Graph Analysis Tasks

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of planning, using tools, and interacting with external environments. They are typically supported by harnesses, which manage state and coordinate multi-step execution. Graph analysis provides a promising setting for evaluating their agentic capabilities, because it requires agents to access data and execute operations in a graph environment. However, existing graph benchmarks for LLMs provide limited coverage of graph tasks and graph types, making it difficult to comprehensively evaluate LLM agents. Moreover, they typically formulate graph analysis as text-based question answering, where graph information is directly provided in the prompt, limiting the evaluation of end-to-end agentic capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce GABench, a comprehensive benchmark for agentic graph analysis. GABench spans three graph types and covers four graph analysis task categories: graph retrieval, graph theory, graph machine learning, and graph open-ended question answering. GABench also provides 84 executable tools for accessing graph data and performing diverse graph operations. Building on these tools, we develop an agentic graph analysis task generation pipeline and construct 10,400 tasks with verifiable ground truth.Using GABench, we evaluate a range of frontier LLMs and agent harnesses. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) Existing LLM agents still struggle with complex graph analysis tasks. (2) Harness choice significantly affects performance, yet existing harnesses remain limited on complex graph tasks. (3) Graph analysis depends more on tool-call quality than quantity. Our findings provide practical insights into the development and evaluation of LLM agents for graph analysis.

HiSkill: Empowering LLM Agents with Hierarchical Skill Graphs

Skills have become an important abstraction for enabling large language model (LLM) agents to reuse past experience in long-horizon interactive tasks. However, existing trajectory-to-skill methods often produce flat collections of high-level textual skills that are stored and retrieved independently, leaving skill relations underutilized and maintaining a gap between high-level skills and executable actions. In this paper, we propose HiSkill, a hierarchical skill graph framework that organizes interaction trajectories into a directed graph with skill nodes, AtomicOp nodes, and typed edges. Specifically, the graph connects reusable high-level skills with executable action templates, while also capturing decomposition, temporal transition, compatibility, support, and recovery relations among them. At inference time, HiSkill retrieves a compact task-relevant subgraph and performs subgraph-guided task execution, where a symbolic task state, an active skill, and the retrieved subgraph guide the LLM agent to switch skills, select AtomicOps, and ground executable actions iteratively. Experiments on three interactive environments show that HiSkill outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while reducing inference token consumption, demonstrating the effectiveness of bridging high-level skills and executable action grounding through a hierarchical skill graph. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/HiSkill.

GeoTrace: Geometry-Aware Trajectory Token Compression for Video Large Language Models

Although Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have shown strong performance in video understanding, their efficiency is still limited by the large number of visual tokens. Existing video token compression methods typically rely on frame-wise saliency or heuristic token merging, which can over-focus on locally salient regions and produce ambiguous fused features. To address these issues, we propose GeoTrace, a training-free spatiotemporal token compression framework that decomposes video evidence into exact skeleton tokens and traceable residual event tokens. Specifically, Contextual Farthest-Point Anchoring (CFPA) preserves salient, context-consistent, and high-coverage skeleton tokens, while Trajectory-Constrained Residual Condensation (TCRC) compresses residual tokens through one-to-one temporal trajectories and constrained near-manifold condensation, producing traceable event tokens with reduced ambiguity. We evaluate GeoTrace on four Video LLMs across four video understanding benchmarks, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness and generalization across different model architectures and scenarios. On LLaVA-OneVision, with only 10\% visual tokens retained, GeoTrace achieves a \(12.99\times\) TFLOPs reduction while preserving 99.1\% of the vanilla performance. Overall, GeoTrace offers a compact and traceable token representation for efficient and robust Video LLM inference. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/guohuan-xie/GeoTrace.git}{\texttt{Code}}.

ParaTool: Shifting Tool Representations from Context to Parameters

Tool calling extends large language models (LLMs) by enabling grounded interaction with external executable interfaces, thereby supporting environment-coupled problem solving. However, mainstream in-context learning (ICL) approaches typically incorporate detailed tool documentation and usage examples directly into the context. This results in substantial inference overhead and heightened risks of hallucination as the context length grows. Conversely, while tuning-based methods improve general tool-calling capabilities, they often fail to effectively internalize the specific details of previously seen tools, thereby retaining a dependency on in-context documentation. To address these limitations, we propose ParaTool, a framework that projects each tool into a dedicated, loadable set of parameters. By equipping a dynamic integration of these parameterized tools, the LLM can perform tool calling without relying on in-context documents or examples. Specifically, our approach consists of three stages: (1) parametric tool pre-training encapsulates the knowledge of different tools into independent parameter modules; (2) soft tool selection employs a gating network to dynamically weigh and aggregate relevant tool parameters; and (3) parametric tool fine-tuning jointly updates tool parameters to align the training and inference processes. Experiments on Stable ToolBench and BFCL demonstrate that ParaTool significantly outperforms strong ICL-based baselines, achieving superior performance while reducing computational complexity.

Ask Now, Use Later: Benchmarking the Proactivity Gap in Long-Lived LLM Agents

A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request. Yet today's agents keep what a user volunteers but rarely ask for what stays unspoken, leaving a proactivity gap in long-lived LLM agents: an agent cannot act on a preference it never obtained. As users delegate more of their affairs to agents, the impact of this gap grows. We isolate one concrete, controllable slice of this gap as Ask-to-Remember (ATR): the agent decides whether to ask now for a reusable user preference that the current task does not need but a later session with the same user will. ATR is hard even to evaluate: the right question is underdetermined and its payoff deferred to tasks that may never arise. ATRBench, to the best of our knowledge the first ATR benchmark, makes it measurable by fixing each user's preferences as hidden ground truth, so success demands asking, not recall. Across eight frontier LLM agents, defaults fall at least 62 points below an oracle handed the relevant preference, and prompting closes little of it. Diagnostics identify acquisition as the bottleneck. ATRBench surfaces this proactivity gap in current agents and offers a diagnostic testbed for closing it.

RelPrism: A Multi-Faceted Pre-training Framework with Self-Generated Tasks for Relational Databases

Relational databases (RDBs) remain the cornerstone of modern data systems and support diverse predictive tasks. Recent relational deep learning (RDL) methods enable end-to-end prediction by converting RDBs into graphs, where rows are represented as nodes and inter-table interactions are represented as edges, and then applying graph-based models for representation learning. Despite the strong capability of RDL, effective self-supervised pre-training for RDBs remains non-trivial. RDB tasks often require multi-faceted information across different perspectives and granularities. For example, user churn classification may rely more on interaction patterns, whereas consumption value prediction requires both user-item behaviors and intrinsic user attributes for fine-grained regression. Such heterogeneous needs challenge RDB representation learning, as pre-training objectives should cover comprehensive information for downstream adaptation. However, existing SSL methods typically derive supervision from a single facet, such as node-level intrinsic attributes or subgraph-level relational structures, providing limited adaptability. To this end, we propose RelPrism, a multi-faceted self-supervised learning framework for RDBs. RelPrism constructs intrinsic, relational, and hybrid attributes from distinct perspectives, and applies multi-granularity clustering to each perspective to form corresponding pseudo-task pools. Pre-training over these pools exposes representations to broader perspectives and granularity levels, yielding a stronger basis for downstream adaptation. Experiments on 14 tasks across 5 real-world datasets show that RelPrism improves ROC-AUC by 4.15% for classification and reduces MAE by 10.75% for regression over state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RelPrism.

Revisiting Graph-Tokenizing Large Language Models: A Systematic Evaluation of Graph Token Understanding

The remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) has motivated researchers to adapt them as universal predictors for various graph tasks. As a widely recognized paradigm, Graph-Tokenizing LLMs (GTokenLLMs) compress complex graph data into graph tokens and treat them as prefix tokens for querying LLMs, leading many to believe that LLMs can understand graphs more effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we challenge this belief: \textit{Do GTokenLLMs fully understand graph tokens in the natural-language embedding space?} Motivated by this question, we formalize a unified framework for GTokenLLMs and propose an evaluation pipeline, \textbf{GTEval}, to assess graph-token understanding via instruction transformations at the format and content levels. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 representative GTokenLLMs with GTEval. The primary findings are as follows: (1) Existing GTokenLLMs do not fully understand graph tokens. They exhibit over-sensitivity or over-insensitivity to instruction changes, and rely heavily on text for reasoning; (2) Although graph tokens preserve task-relevant graph information and receive attention across LLM layers, their utilization varies across models and instruction variants; (3) Additional instruction tuning can improve performance on the original and seen instructions, but it does not fully address the challenge of graph-token understanding, calling for further improvement.

Position: How can Graphs Help Large Language Models?

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), classic graph learning tasks have greatly benefited from LLMs, including improved encoding of textual features, more efficient construction of graphs from text, and enhanced reasoning over knowledge graphs. In this paper, we ask a complementary question: How can graphs help LLMs? We address this question from three perspectives: 1) graphs provide an up-to-date knowledge source that helps reduce LLM hallucinations, 2) graph-based prompting techniques-such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Tree-of-Thought (ToT), and Graph-of-Thought (GoT)-enhance LLM reasoning capabilities, and 3) integrating graphs into LLMs improves their understanding of structured data, expanding their applicability to domains such as e-commerce, code, and relational databases (RDBs). We further outlook some future directions including designing sparse LLM architectures based on graphs and brain-inspired memory systems.

Disentangled Graph Prompting for Out-Of-Distribution Detection

When testing data and training data come from different distributions, deep neural networks (DNNs) will face significant safety risks in practical applications. Therefore, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection techniques, which can identify OOD samples at test time and alert the system, are urgently needed. Existing graph OOD detection methods usually characterize fine-grained in-distribution (ID) patterns from multiple perspectives, and train end-to-end graph neural networks (GNNs) for prediction. However, due to the unavailability of OOD data during training, the absence of explicit supervision signals could lead to sub-optimal performance of end-to-end encoders. To address this issue, we follow the pre-training+prompting paradigm to utilize pre-trained GNN encoders, and propose Disentangled Graph Prompting (DGP), to capture fine-grained ID patterns with the help of ID graph labels. Specifically, we design two prompt generators that respectively generate class-specific and class-agnostic prompt graphs by modifying the edge weights of an input graph. We also design several effective losses to train the prompt generators and prevent trivial solutions. We conduct extensive experiments on ten datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DGP, which achieves a relative AUC improvement of 3.63% over the best graph OOD detection baseline. Ablation studies and hyper-parameter experiments further show the effectiveness of DGP. Code is available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/DGP.

GNNVerifier: Graph-based Verifier for LLM Task Planning

Large language models (LLMs) facilitate the development of autonomous agents. As a core component of such agents, task planning aims to decompose complex natural language requests into concrete, solvable sub-tasks. Since LLM-generated plans are frequently prone to hallucinations and sensitive to long-context prom-pts, recent research has introduced plan verifiers to identify and correct potential flaws. However, most existing approaches still rely on an LLM as the verifier via additional prompting for plan review or self-reflection. LLM-based verifiers can be misled by plausible narration and struggle to detect failures caused by structural relations across steps, such as type mismatches, missing intermediates, or broken dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose a graph-based verifier for LLM task planning. Specifically, the proposed method has four major components: Firstly, we represent a plan as a directed graph with enriched attributes, where nodes denote sub-tasks and edges encode execution order and dependency constraints. Secondly, a graph neural network (GNN) then performs structural evaluation and diagnosis, producing a graph-level plausibility score for plan acceptance as well as node/edge-level risk scores to localize erroneous regions. Thirdly, we construct controllable perturbations from ground truth plan graphs, and automatically generate training data with fine-grained annotations. Finally, guided by the feedback from our GNN verifier, we enable an LLM to conduct local edits (e.g., tool replacement or insertion) to correct the plan when the graph-level score is insufficient. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, backbone LLMs, and planners demonstrate that our GNNVerifier achieves significant gains in improving plan quality. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/GNNVerifier.