Uncovering Semantic Hierarchies in Text-Attributed Graphs via Variational EM-based LLM-GNN Synergy

Yunhui Liu, Xudong Jin, Qizhuo Xie, Chunhui Zhao, Xiao Luo +3

While hierarchical structures are intrinsic to organizing human knowledge, current representation learning on text-attributed graphs predominantly operates on flat semantic spaces, overlooking the rich coarse-to-fine granularity inherent in real-world data. To bridge this gap, we propose SHiFT, which synergizes the reasoning power of LLMs with the structural representation capability of GNNs within an Expectation-Maximization (EM) paradigm. In the E-step, we harness LLMs as expert taxonomists to induce an explicit semantic tree, introducing a lightweight Mapping & Diagnosis strategy that reduces inference costs by surgically updating the hierarchy only when anomalies are detected. In the M-step, we align the GNN encoder with this induced hierarchy from complementary perspectives, including clustering partition, topological skeleton, and semantic concepts. Theoretical analysis interprets SHiFT as a generalized Variational EM algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SHiFT not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also uncovers high-quality, human-readable taxonomies. Our code can be found at https://github.com/Cloudy1225/SHiFT.