Towards Self-cognitive Exploration: Metacognitive Knowledge Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yuan, Xujie, Di, Shimin, Tang, Jielong, Zheng, Libin, Yin, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yuan, Xujie
Di, Shimin
Tang, Jielong
Zheng, Libin
Yin, Jian
author_facet Yuan, Xujie
Di, Shimin
Tang, Jielong
Zheng, Libin
Yin, Jian
contents Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LargeLanguage Models by leveraging structured knowledge. However, existing KG-RAG frameworks typically operate as open-loop systems, suffering from cognitive blindness, an inability to recognize their exploration deficiencies. This leads to relevance drift and incomplete evidence, which existing self-refinement methods, designed for unstructured text-based RAG, cannot effectively resolve due to the path-dependent nature of graph exploration. To address this challenge, we propose Metacognitive Knowledge Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (MetaKGRAG), a novel framework inspired by the human metacognition process, which introduces a Perceive-Evaluate-Adjust cycle to enable path-aware, closed-loop refinement. This cycle empowers the system to self-assess exploration quality, identify deficiencies in coverage or relevance, and perform trajectory-connected corrections from precise pivot points. Extensive experiments across five datasets in the medical, legal, and commonsense reasoning domains demonstrate that MetaKGRAG consistently outperforms strong KG-RAG and self-refinement baselines. Our results validate the superiority of our approach and highlight the critical need for path-aware refinement in structured knowledge retrieval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Self-cognitive Exploration: Metacognitive Knowledge Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation
Yuan, Xujie
Di, Shimin
Tang, Jielong
Zheng, Libin
Yin, Jian
Information Retrieval
Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LargeLanguage Models by leveraging structured knowledge. However, existing KG-RAG frameworks typically operate as open-loop systems, suffering from cognitive blindness, an inability to recognize their exploration deficiencies. This leads to relevance drift and incomplete evidence, which existing self-refinement methods, designed for unstructured text-based RAG, cannot effectively resolve due to the path-dependent nature of graph exploration. To address this challenge, we propose Metacognitive Knowledge Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (MetaKGRAG), a novel framework inspired by the human metacognition process, which introduces a Perceive-Evaluate-Adjust cycle to enable path-aware, closed-loop refinement. This cycle empowers the system to self-assess exploration quality, identify deficiencies in coverage or relevance, and perform trajectory-connected corrections from precise pivot points. Extensive experiments across five datasets in the medical, legal, and commonsense reasoning domains demonstrate that MetaKGRAG consistently outperforms strong KG-RAG and self-refinement baselines. Our results validate the superiority of our approach and highlight the critical need for path-aware refinement in structured knowledge retrieval.
title Towards Self-cognitive Exploration: Metacognitive Knowledge Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09460