GNN-as-Judge: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Graph Few-shot Semi-supervised Learning with GNN Feedback

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission12815 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Models, Graph Neural Networks, Graph Few-shot Semi-supervised Learning

TL;DR: We propose GNN-as-Judge, a framework that leverages GNNs' feedback to select reliable pseudo-labels and a weakly supervised fine-tuning approach for tuning LLMs.

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) due to their superior semantic understanding ability on textual node features. However, their effectiveness as predictors in the few-shot semi-supervised setting, where labeled nodes are rather limited, remains constrained since fine-tuning LLMs usually requires sufficient labeled data, especially when the TAG shows complex structural patterns. In essence, this paper targets two key challenges: (i) the difficulty of generating and selecting reliable pseudo labels on TAGs for LLMs, and (ii) the need to mitigate potential label noise when fine-tuning LLMs with pseudo labels. To counter the challenges, we propose a new framework, GNN-as-Judge, which can unleash the power of LLMs for few-shot semi-supervised learning on TAGs by incorporating the structural inductive bias of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Specifically, GNN-as-Judge introduces a collaborative pseudo-labeling strategy that first identifies the most influenced unlabeled nodes from labeled nodes, then exploits both the agreement and disagreement patterns between LLMs and GNNs to generate reliable labels. Furthermore, we develop a weakly-supervised LLM fine-tuning algorithm that can distill the knowledge from informative pseudo labels while mitigating the potential label noise. Experiments on different TAG datasets demonstrate that GNN-as-Judge significantly outperforms existing methods, especially under low-resource regimes.

Primary Area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies

Submission Number: 12815