GaLoRA: Parameter-Efficient Graph-Aware LLMs for Node Classification

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has popularized text-attributed graphs (TAGs), creating an urgent need for graph structure learning (GSL) methods that effectively leverage textual information. However, existing GSL approaches are designed for traditional graphs without text, and adapting them to LLMs faces two challenges: defining a suitable optimization objective given LLMs' massive parameters, and designing an efficient architecture without costly fine-tuning. To address these, we propose LLaTA (Large Language and Tree Assistant), which reformulates GSL as a tree optimization framework---shifting from training edge predictors to designing a language-aware tree sampler. LLaTA constructs structural encoding trees via entropy minimization to capture topology, then leverages tree-guided LLM in-context learning to integrate textual semantics without fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets demonstrate LLaTA's flexibility with any backbone, superior scalability over LLM-based GSL methods, and state-of-the-art effectiveness across diverse domains.

Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) integrate graph structures and node-associated textual attributes, and recent studies have increasingly leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve TAG learning in few-shot settings. However, existing approaches typically utilize LLM-derived information uniformly across all nodes, despite substantial variations in its reliability, while also incurring considerable monetary costs. We argue that the most appropriate source of supervision may differ across nodes, as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and LLMs exhibit complementary strengths in exploiting structural and semantic information, respectively. To this end, we propose CoTeach, a Confidence-aware dual-teacher learning framework that dynamically selects the more reliable teacher for each node. Experimental results demonstrate that CoTeach consistently improves few-shot node classification performance while reducing unnecessary LLM utilization and associated monetary costs.

Node classification on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is a fundamental task with broad applications in citation analysis, social networks, and recommendation systems. Current GNN-based approaches suffer from shallow text encoding and heavy dependence on labeled data, limiting their effectiveness in label-scarce settings. While large language models (LLMs) naturally address the text understanding gap with deep semantic reasoning, existing LLM-for-graph methods either still require abundant labels during training or fail to exploit the rich structural signals freely available in graph topology. Our key observation is that, in many real-world TAGs, edges predominantly connect similar nodes under the homophily principle, meaning graph topology inherently encodes class structure without any labels. Building on this insight, we reformulate node classification as a link prediction task and present HopRank, a fully self-supervised LLM-tuning framework for TAGs. HopRank constructs preference data via hierarchical hop-based sampling and employs adaptive preference learning to prioritize informative training signals without any class labels. At inference, nodes are classified by predicting their connection preferences to labeled anchors, with an adaptive early-exit voting scheme to improve efficiency. Experiments on three TAG benchmarks show that HopRank matches fully-supervised GNNs and substantially outperforms prior graph-LLM methods, despite using zero labeled training data.