Follow the Path: Reasoning over Knowledge Graph Paths to Improve Large Language Model Factuality
For researchers and practitioners using LLMs for knowledge-intensive tasks, this work provides a simple method to enhance factuality by grounding reasoning in KG paths, showing strong improvements on complex questions.
The paper introduces fs1, a method that improves LLM factuality by fine-tuning on reasoning traces grounded in knowledge graph paths. The fs1-tuned model outperforms instruction-tuned baselines by 6-14 absolute points (pass@16) on six open-domain QA benchmarks.
We introduce fs1, a simple yet effective method that improves the factuality of reasoning traces by collecting them from large reasoning models and grounding them in knowledge graph (KG) paths. We fine-tune eight instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) on 3.9K factually grounded reasoning traces and rigorously evaluate them on six complex open-domain question-answering (QA) benchmarks encompassing 23.9K questions. Our results demonstrate that our fs1-tuned model consistently outperforms instruction-tuned counterparts with parallel sampling by 6-14 absolute points (pass@16). Our detailed analysis shows that fs1 considerably improves model performance over more complex questions (requiring 3 or more hops on KG paths) and numerical answer types compared to the baselines. Furthermore, in single-pass inference, we notice that smaller LLMs show the most improvements. While prior works demonstrate the effectiveness of reasoning traces primarily in the STEM domains, our work shows strong evidence that anchoring reasoning to factual KG paths is a critical step in transforming LLMs for reliable knowledge-intensive tasks.