Graph-to-Vision: Multi-graph Understanding and Reasoning using Vision-Language Models
This work addresses the critical challenge of multi-graph reasoning for researchers and practitioners in AI, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VLM capabilities.
The paper tackled the underexplored problem of multi-graph joint reasoning by introducing the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate and enhance Vision-Language Models' abilities, covering four graph types and tasks of increasing complexity, with fine-tuning showing consistent improvements.
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising capabilities in interpreting visualized graph data, offering a new perspective for graph-structured reasoning beyond traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing studies focus primarily on single-graph reasoning, leaving the critical challenge of multi-graph joint reasoning underexplored. In this work, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate and enhance the multi-graph reasoning abilities of VLMs. Our benchmark covers four common graph types-knowledge graphs, flowcharts, mind maps, and route maps-and supports both homogeneous and heterogeneous graph groupings with tasks of increasing complexity. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs under a multi-dimensional scoring framework that assesses graph parsing, reasoning consistency, and instruction-following accuracy. Additionally, we fine-tune multiple open-source models and observe consistent improvements, confirming the effectiveness of our dataset. This work provides a principled step toward advancing multi-graph understanding and reveals new opportunities for cross-modal graph intelligence.