Title: ResearchArcade: Graph Interface for Academic Tasks
Primary area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies
Keywords: research data integration; multi-modal data; heterogeneous graph; large language model; graph neural network

Abstract: Academic research generates diverse data sources, and as researchers increasingly use machine learning to assist research tasks, a crucial question arises: Can we build a unified data interface to support the development of machine learning models for various academic tasks? Models trained on such a unified interface can better support human researchers throughout the research process, eventually accelerating knowledge discovery. In this work, we introduce RESEARCHARCADE, a graph-based interface that connects multiple academic data sources, unifies task definitions, and supports a wide range of base models to address key academic challenges. RESEARCHARCADE utilizes a coherent multi-table format with graph structures to organize data from different sources, including academic corpora from ArXiv and peer reviews from OpenReview, while capturing information with multiple modalities, such as text, figures, and tables. RESEARCHARCADE also preserves temporal evolution at both the manuscript and community levels, supporting the study of paper revisions as well as broader research trends over time. Additionally, RESEARCHARCADE unifies diverse academic task definitions and supports various models with distinct input requirements. Our experiments across six academic tasks demonstrate that combining cross-source and multi-modal information enables a broader range of tasks, while incorporating graph structures consistently improves performance over baseline methods. This highlights the effectiveness of RESEARCHARCADE and its potential to advance research progress.