Yanbin Wei

Yanbin Wei, Jiangyue Yan, Chun Kang et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as versatile solutions for zero-shot question answering (QA) across various domains. However, enabling VLMs to effectively comprehend structured graphs and perform accurate, efficient QA remains challenging. Existing approaches typically rely on one single graph topology representation (GTR), such as fixed-style visual images or unified text descriptions. This ``one-size-fits-all'' strategy often neglects model-specific and task-specific preferences, resulting in inaccurate or over-lengthy responses to graph-related queries. To address this, we propose the $\mbox{DynamicGTR}$ framework, which dynamically selects the optimal GTR for each query during inference, thereby enhancing the zero-shot graph QA capabilities of VLMs with a customizable accuracy and brevity trade-off. Extensive experiments show that DynamicGTR not only improves VLM-based graph algorithm QA performance but also successfully transfers the experience trained from synthetic graph algorithm tasks to real-world applications like link prediction and node classification, without any additional training. Additionally, DynamicGTR demonstrates strong transferability across tasks, domains, and models, suggesting its potential as a flexible solution for broad graph scenarios.

David Ma, Huaqing Yuan, Xingjian Wang et al.

Although long-video understanding demands that models capture hierarchical temporal information -- from clip (seconds) and shot (tens of seconds) to event (minutes) and story (hours) -- existing benchmarks either neglect this multi-scale design or scatter scale-specific questions across different videos, preventing direct comparison of model performance across timescales on the same content. To address this, we introduce ScaleLong, the first benchmark to disentangle these factors by embedding questions targeting four hierarchical timescales -- clip (seconds), shot (tens of seconds), event (minutes), and story (hours) -- all within the same video content. This within-content multi-timescale questioning design enables direct comparison of model performance across timescales on identical videos. ScaleLong features 269 long videos (avg.\ 86\,min) from 5 main categories and 36 sub-categories, with 4--8 carefully designed questions, including at least one question for each timescale. Evaluating 23 MLLMs reveals a U-shaped performance curve, with higher accuracy at the shortest and longest timescales and a dip at intermediate levels. Furthermore, ablation studies show that increased visual token capacity consistently enhances reasoning across all timescales. ScaleLong offers a fine-grained, multi-timescale benchmark for advancing MLLM capabilities in long-video understanding. The code and dataset are available https://github.com/multimodal-art-projection/ScaleLong.

Yanbin Wei, Qiushi Huang, James T. Kwok et al.

Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) is crucial for addressing knowledge graph incompleteness and supporting downstream applications. Many models have been proposed for KGC. They can be categorized into two main classes: triple-based and text-based approaches. Triple-based methods struggle with long-tail entities due to limited structural information and imbalanced entity distributions. Text-based methods alleviate this issue but require costly training for language models and specific finetuning for knowledge graphs, which limits their efficiency. To alleviate these limitations, in this paper, we propose KICGPT, a framework that integrates a large language model (LLM) and a triple-based KGC retriever. It alleviates the long-tail problem without incurring additional training overhead. KICGPT uses an in-context learning strategy called Knowledge Prompt, which encodes structural knowledge into demonstrations to guide the LLM. Empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of KICGPT with smaller training overhead and no finetuning.

Yanbin Wei, Shuai Fu, Weisen Jiang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for various tasks with graph structures. Though LLMs can process graph information in a textual format, they overlook the rich vision modality, which is an intuitive way for humans to comprehend structural information and conduct general graph reasoning. The potential benefits and capabilities of representing graph structures as visual images (i.e., $\textit{visual graph}$) are still unexplored. To fill the gap, we innovatively propose an end-to-end framework, called $\textbf{G}$raph to v$\textbf{I}$sual and $\textbf{T}$extual Integr$\textbf{A}$tion (GITA), which firstly incorporates visual graphs into general graph reasoning. Besides, we establish $\textbf{G}$raph-based $\textbf{V}$ision-$\textbf{L}$anguage $\textbf{Q}$uestion $\textbf{A}$nswering (GVLQA) dataset from existing graph data, which is the first vision-language dataset for general graph reasoning purposes. Extensive experiments on the GVLQA dataset and five real-world datasets show that GITA outperforms mainstream LLMs in terms of general graph reasoning capabilities. Moreover, We highlight the effectiveness of the layout augmentation on visual graphs and pretraining on the GVLQA dataset.

Yanbin Wei, Jiangyue Yan, Chun Kang et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown generalized zero-shot capabilities in diverse domain question-answering (QA) tasks, including graph QA that involves complex graph topologies. However, most current approaches use only a single type of graph representation, namely Topology Representation Form (TRF), such as prompt-unified text descriptions or style-fixed visual styles. Those "one-size-fits-all" approaches fail to consider the specific preferences of different models or tasks, often leading to incorrect or overly long responses. To address this, we first analyze the characteristics and weaknesses of existing TRFs, and then design a set of TRFs, denoted by $F_{ZS}$, tailored to zero-shot graph QA. We then introduce a new metric, Graph Response Efficiency (GRE), which measures the balance between the performance and the brevity in graph QA. Built on these, we develop the DynamicTRF framework, which aims to improve both the accuracy and conciseness of graph QA. To be specific, DynamicTRF first creates a TRF Preference (TRFP) dataset that ranks TRFs based on their GRE scores, to probe the question-specific TRF preferences. Then it trains a TRF router on the TRFP dataset, to adaptively assign the best TRF from $F_{ZS}$ for each question during the inference. Extensive experiments across 7 in-domain algorithmic graph QA tasks and 2 out-of-domain downstream tasks show that DynamicTRF significantly enhances the zero-shot graph QA of LMMs in terms of accuracy