English

When to Trust: A Causality-Aware Calibration Framework for Accurate Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Computation and Language 2026-02-04 v2

Abstract

Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) extends the RAG paradigm by incorporating structured knowledge from knowledge graphs, enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform more precise and explainable reasoning. While KG-RAG improves factual accuracy in complex tasks, existing KG-RAG models are often severely overconfident, producing high-confidence predictions even when retrieved sub-graphs are incomplete or unreliable, which raises concerns for deployment in high-stakes domains. To address this issue, we propose Ca2KG, a Causality-aware Calibration framework for KG-RAG. Ca2KG integrates counterfactual prompting, which exposes retrieval-dependent uncertainties in knowledge quality and reasoning reliability, with a panel-based re-scoring mechanism that stabilises predictions across interventions. Extensive experiments on two complex QA datasets demonstrate that Ca2KG consistently improves calibration while maintaining or even enhancing predictive accuracy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.09241,
  title  = {When to Trust: A Causality-Aware Calibration Framework for Accurate Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation},
  author = {Jing Ren and Bowen Li and Ziqi Xu and Xikun Zhang and Haytham Fayek and Xiaodong Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09241},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted by WWW 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:03:56.569Z