English

Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs

Computation and Language 2024-10-04 v3 Information Retrieval Machine Learning

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs), while exhibiting exceptional performance, suffer from hallucinations, especially on knowledge-intensive tasks. Existing works propose to augment LLMs with individual text units retrieved from external knowledge corpora to alleviate the issue. However, in many domains, texts are interconnected (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic graph are linked by citations and co-authorships) which form a (text-attributed) graph. The knowledge in such graphs is encoded not only in single texts/nodes but also in their associated connections. To facilitate the research of augmenting LLMs with graphs, we manually construct a Graph Reasoning Benchmark dataset called GRBench, containing 1,740 questions that can be answered with the knowledge from 10 domain graphs. Then, we propose a simple and effective framework called Graph Chain-of-thought (Graph-CoT) to augment LLMs with graphs by encouraging LLMs to reason on the graph iteratively. Each Graph-CoT iteration consists of three sub-steps: LLM reasoning, LLM-graph interaction, and graph execution. We conduct systematic experiments with three LLM backbones on GRBench, where Graph-CoT outperforms the baselines consistently. The code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Graph-CoT.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.07103,
  title  = {Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs},
  author = {Bowen Jin and Chulin Xie and Jiawei Zhang and Kashob Kumar Roy and Yu Zhang and Zheng Li and Ruirui Li and Xianfeng Tang and Suhang Wang and Yu Meng and Jiawei Han},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07103},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages. Code: https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Graph-CoT

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:50:07.211Z