Walk&Retrieve: Simple Yet Effective Zero-shot Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Knowledge Graph Walks

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Hauptverfasser: Böckling, Martin, Paulheim, Heiko, Iana, Andreea
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Böckling, Martin
Paulheim, Heiko
Iana, Andreea
author_facet Böckling, Martin
Paulheim, Heiko
Iana, Andreea
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive reasoning abilities, but often suffer from hallucinations or outdated knowledge. Knowledge Graph (KG)-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) remedies these shortcomings by grounding LLM responses in structured external information from a knowledge base. However, many KG-based RAG approaches struggle with (i) aligning KG and textual representations, (ii) balancing retrieval accuracy and efficiency, and (iii) adapting to dynamically updated KGs. In this work, we introduce Walk&Retrieve, a simple yet effective KG-based framework that leverages walk-based graph traversal and knowledge verbalization for corpus generation for zero-shot RAG. Built around efficient KG walks, our method does not require fine-tuning on domain-specific data, enabling seamless adaptation to KG updates, reducing computational overhead, and allowing integration with any off-the-shelf backbone LLM. Despite its simplicity, Walk&Retrieve performs competitively, often outperforming existing RAG systems in response accuracy and hallucination reduction. Moreover, it demonstrates lower query latency and robust scalability to large KGs, highlighting the potential of lightweight retrieval strategies as strong baselines for future RAG research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_16849
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Walk&Retrieve: Simple Yet Effective Zero-shot Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Knowledge Graph Walks
Böckling, Martin
Paulheim, Heiko
Iana, Andreea
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
H.3.3; I.2.7
Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive reasoning abilities, but often suffer from hallucinations or outdated knowledge. Knowledge Graph (KG)-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) remedies these shortcomings by grounding LLM responses in structured external information from a knowledge base. However, many KG-based RAG approaches struggle with (i) aligning KG and textual representations, (ii) balancing retrieval accuracy and efficiency, and (iii) adapting to dynamically updated KGs. In this work, we introduce Walk&Retrieve, a simple yet effective KG-based framework that leverages walk-based graph traversal and knowledge verbalization for corpus generation for zero-shot RAG. Built around efficient KG walks, our method does not require fine-tuning on domain-specific data, enabling seamless adaptation to KG updates, reducing computational overhead, and allowing integration with any off-the-shelf backbone LLM. Despite its simplicity, Walk&Retrieve performs competitively, often outperforming existing RAG systems in response accuracy and hallucination reduction. Moreover, it demonstrates lower query latency and robust scalability to large KGs, highlighting the potential of lightweight retrieval strategies as strong baselines for future RAG research.
title Walk&Retrieve: Simple Yet Effective Zero-shot Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Knowledge Graph Walks
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
H.3.3; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16849