Inspired by the recent advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, there's growing interest in applying LLMs to graph-related tasks. This study delves into the capabilities of instruction-following LLMs for engaging with real-world graphs, aiming to offer empirical insights into how LLMs can effectively interact with graphs and generalize across graph tasks. We begin by constructing a dataset designed for instruction tuning, which comprises a diverse collection of 79 graph-related tasks from academic and e-commerce domains, featuring 44,240 training instances and 18,960 test samples. Utilizing this benchmark, our initial investigation focuses on identifying the optimal graph representation that serves as a conduit for LLMs to understand complex graph structures. Our findings indicate that JSON format for graph representation consistently outperforms natural language and code formats across various LLMs and graph types. Furthermore, we examine the key factors that influence the generalization abilities of instruction-tuned LLMs by evaluating their performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain graph tasks.

本研究针对大型语言模型在图相关任务中的应用，填补了现有研究的空白。我们提出了一种新的数据集，包含79个图任务，并发现JSON格式在图表示上对语言模型的理解效果最佳。这一发现为如何有效使用大型语言模型处理复杂图结构提供了实证依据，具有重要的应用潜力。

研究大型语言模型在图上的指令调优