The Underappreciated Power of Vision Models for Graph Structural Understanding

Xinjian Zhao, Wei Pang, Zhongkai Xue, Xiangru (Edward) Jian, Lei Zhang, Yaoyao Xu, Xiaozhuang Song, Shu Wu, Tianshu Yu

The Underappreciated Power of Vision Models for Graph Structural Understanding: 22 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #6 of 30 papers on 2025-11-04. Day-by-day upvote history. It lost 14 votes when the Hub removed votes in bulk.

Graph Neural Networks operate through bottom-up message-passing, fundamentally differing from human visual perception, which intuitively captures global structures first. We investigate the underappreciated potential of vision models for graph understanding, finding they achieve performance comparable to GNNs on established benchmarks while exhibiting distinctly different learning patterns. These divergent behaviors, combined with limitations of existing benchmarks that conflate domain features with topological understanding, motivate our introduction of GraphAbstract. This benchmark evaluates models' ability to perceive global graph properties as humans do: recognizing organizational archetypes, detecting symmetry, sensing connectivity strength, and identifying critical elements. Our results reveal that vision models significantly outperform GNNs on tasks requiring holistic structural understanding and maintain generalizability across varying graph scales, while GNNs struggle with global pattern abstraction and degrade with increasing graph size. This work demonstrates that vision models possess remarkable yet underutilized capabilities for graph structural understanding, particularly for problems requiring global topological awareness and scale-invariant reasoning. These findings open new avenues to leverage this underappreciated potential for developing more effective graph foundation models for tasks dominated by holistic pattern recognition.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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