LLM Enhancers for GNNs: An Analysis from the Perspective of Causal Mechanism Identification

Abstract: The use of LLMs as feature enhancers to optimize node representations, which are then used as inputs for graph neural networks (GNNs), has shown significant potential in graph representation learning. However, the fundamental properties of this approach remain underexplored. To address this issue, we propose conducting a more in-depth analysis of this issue based on the interchange intervention method. First, we construct a synthetic graph dataset with controllable causal relationships, enabling precise manipulation of semantic relationships and causal modeling to provide data for analysis. Using this dataset, we conduct interchange interventions to examine the deeper properties of LLM enhancers and GNNs, uncovering their underlying logic and internal mechanisms. Building on the analytical results, we design a plug-and-play optimization module to improve the information transfer between LLM enhancers and GNNs. Experiments across multiple datasets and models validate the proposed module.