StepChain GraphRAG: Reasoning Over Knowledge Graphs for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ni, Tengjun, Yuan, Xin, Li, Shenghong, Wu, Kai, Liu, Ren Ping, Ni, Wei, Zhang, Wenjie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ni, Tengjun
Yuan, Xin
Li, Shenghong
Wu, Kai
Liu, Ren Ping
Ni, Wei
Zhang, Wenjie
author_facet Ni, Tengjun
Yuan, Xin
Li, Shenghong
Wu, Kai
Liu, Ren Ping
Ni, Wei
Zhang, Wenjie
contents Recent progress in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has led to more accurate and interpretable multi-hop question answering (QA). Yet, challenges persist in integrating iterative reasoning steps with external knowledge retrieval. To address this, we introduce StepChain GraphRAG, a framework that unites question decomposition with a Breadth-First Search (BFS) Reasoning Flow for enhanced multi-hop QA. Our approach first builds a global index over the corpus; at inference time, only retrieved passages are parsed on-the-fly into a knowledge graph, and the complex query is split into sub-questions. For each sub-question, a BFS-based traversal dynamically expands along relevant edges, assembling explicit evidence chains without overwhelming the language model with superfluous context. Experiments on MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and HotpotQA show that StepChain GraphRAG achieves state-of-the-art Exact Match and F1 scores. StepChain GraphRAG lifts average EM by 2.57% and F1 by 2.13% over the SOTA method, achieving the largest gain on HotpotQA (+4.70% EM, +3.44% F1). StepChain GraphRAG also fosters enhanced explainability by preserving the chain-of-thought across intermediate retrieval steps. We conclude by discussing how future work can mitigate the computational overhead and address potential hallucinations from large language models to refine efficiency and reliability in multi-hop QA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02827
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle StepChain GraphRAG: Reasoning Over Knowledge Graphs for Multi-Hop Question Answering
Ni, Tengjun
Yuan, Xin
Li, Shenghong
Wu, Kai
Liu, Ren Ping
Ni, Wei
Zhang, Wenjie
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Recent progress in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has led to more accurate and interpretable multi-hop question answering (QA). Yet, challenges persist in integrating iterative reasoning steps with external knowledge retrieval. To address this, we introduce StepChain GraphRAG, a framework that unites question decomposition with a Breadth-First Search (BFS) Reasoning Flow for enhanced multi-hop QA. Our approach first builds a global index over the corpus; at inference time, only retrieved passages are parsed on-the-fly into a knowledge graph, and the complex query is split into sub-questions. For each sub-question, a BFS-based traversal dynamically expands along relevant edges, assembling explicit evidence chains without overwhelming the language model with superfluous context. Experiments on MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and HotpotQA show that StepChain GraphRAG achieves state-of-the-art Exact Match and F1 scores. StepChain GraphRAG lifts average EM by 2.57% and F1 by 2.13% over the SOTA method, achieving the largest gain on HotpotQA (+4.70% EM, +3.44% F1). StepChain GraphRAG also fosters enhanced explainability by preserving the chain-of-thought across intermediate retrieval steps. We conclude by discussing how future work can mitigate the computational overhead and address potential hallucinations from large language models to refine efficiency and reliability in multi-hop QA.
title StepChain GraphRAG: Reasoning Over Knowledge Graphs for Multi-Hop Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02827