@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-compressing,
    title = "Compressing {LLM} Knowledge into Graph Representations for Text-attributed Graphs Learning",
    author = "Chen, Runhuai  and
      Shen, Dian  and
      Zhang, Dandan  and
      Huang, Kaihong  and
      Meng, Linghui  and
      Wang, Beilun",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1398/",
    pages = "30303--30318",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) require jointly modeling relational structure and node-level text. Existing GNN-LLM approaches perform by incorporating large language models at inference time for processing the text attributes, resulting in costly deployment. More fundamentally, LLM knowledge is typically used in a sample-wise manner, leading to inefficient utilization across graph instances. In this work, we study how interactions with LLM embedding spaces affect graph representations, and show that projecting into the LLM space can learn better GNNs. That is to say, the knowledge encoded in LLM embeddings can be compressed into graph representations. Based on this insight, we propose a framework that internalizes LLM knowledge within graph models and supports inference-efficient TAG learning. Our framework employs a hierarchical Proxy-Purifier module with distribution-level regularization, using LLM embeddings only as training-time guidance. With this module, the model operates TAGs without invoking LLMs, achieving high efficiency as standard GNNs without LLMs. Notably, experiments on five popular TAG tasks further demonstrate that our method can also achieve consistent performance gains, in comparison to existing GNN-LLM approaches."
}