Where LLM Annotators Fail: Label-Free Learning on Graphs with LLMs

Abstract

Node classification on graphs often requires labeled nodes, yet obtaining labels at graph scale is expensive. When node attributes contain semantic content, such as paper abstracts, web pages, or product descriptions, large language models (LLMs) can provide low-cost supervision by annotating a small subset of nodes. However, these LLM-generated labels are noisy, and existing label-free graph learning methods usually treat this noise as either global or class-conditional. We find that LLM annotation errors are not only class-dependent but also region-dependent: within the same class, reliability can vary sharply across feature-space clusters. In light of this, we propose Cluster-Aware Noise Estimation (CANE), a label-free learning framework that estimates cluster-conditional LLM reliability without ground truth labels, and uses this estimate to decide which pseudo-labels to trust, and which labels to correct. Across various graph benchmarks and GNN backbones, CANE improves over the strongest label-free baselines, with the largest gains on datasets exhibiting stronger cluster-conditional noise.