Rendering Graphs for Graph Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

LLMs are increasingly used for various tasks with graph structures, such as robotic planning, knowledge graph completion, and common-sense reasoning. Though LLMs can comprehend graph information in a textual format, they overlook the rich visual modality, which is an intuitive way for humans to comprehend structural information and conduct graph reasoning. The potential benefits and capabilities of representing graph structures as visual images (i.e., visual graph) is still unexplored. In this paper, we take the first step in incorporating visual information into graph reasoning tasks and propose a new benchmark GITQA, where each sample is a tuple (graph, image, textual description). We conduct extensive experiments on the GITQA benchmark using state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs. Results on graph reasoning tasks show that combining textual and visual information together performs better than using one modality alone. Moreover, the LLaVA-7B/13B models finetuned on the training set (referred to as GITA), achieve higher accuracy than the closed-source model GPT-4(V). We also study the effects of augmentations in graph reasoning.