Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on agentic capabilities—iterative retrieval, tool use, and decision-making—to overcome the limits of static, parametric knowledge. Yet existing agentic frameworks treat external information as unstructured text and fail to leverage the topological dependencies inherent in real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Agentic Graph Learning (AGL), a paradigm that reframes graph learning as an interleaved process of topology-aware navigation and LLM-based inference. Specifically, we propose AgentGL, the first reinforcement learning (RL)–driven framework for AGL. AgentGL equips an LLM agent with graph-native tools for multi-scale exploration, regulates tool usage via search-constrained thinking to balance accuracy and efficiency, and employs a graph-conditioned curriculum RL strategy to stabilize long-horizon policy learning without step-wise supervision. Across diverse Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) benchmarks and multiple LLM backbones, AgentGL substantially outperforms strong GraphLLMs and GraphRAG baselines, achieving absolute improvements of up to 17.5% in node classification and 28.4% in link prediction. These results demonstrate that AGL is a promising frontier for enabling LLMs to autonomously navigate and reason over complex relational environments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/AgentGL.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.1161
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 25313–25335
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1161/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yuanfu Sun, Kang Li, Dongzhe Fan, Jiajin Liu, and Qiaoyu Tan. 2026. AgentGL: Towards Agentic Graph Learning with LLMs via Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 25313–25335, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- AgentGL: Towards Agentic Graph Learning with LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (Sun et al., ACL 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1161.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.acl-long.1161.checklist.pdf




























