Theseus in the Graph: Towards Traceable Multi-Hop Graph Navigation

Abstract:Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) tasks require models to assemble relational evidence along paths in a KG to answer natural-language questions. However, existing KGQA systems typically focus on predicting the final answer without explicitly modeling or validating the intermediate reasoning steps, obscuring whether the correct answers arise from faithful multi-hop reasoning. To address this limitation, we re-frame multi-hop KGQA as a question-conditioned graph navigation problem. We refer to this formulation as THESEUS - Traceable Hop-wise Evidence SEarch in a Unified Semantics. In this setting, an agent receives a KG, a question, and a topic entity, and traverses a sequence of relations towards the answer, making the reasoning path explicit. To systematically study this formulation, we provide three key contributions. (i) We augment the existing KINSHIP and MQuAKE resources into navigation-ready KGQA datasets with annotated evidence paths and paraphrased questions. (ii) We design evaluation protocols to measure path fidelity, robustness to linguistic variation, and performance across multi-hop and multi-answer questions. (iii) We adapt established path-based KG completion agents - MINERVA, MultiHopKG, and SQUIRE - to operate on full question embeddings rather than symbolic single-relation queries, enabling their trajectories to be guided by natural-language semantics. Together, these contributions advance KGQA research toward systems where traceability is fundamental: answers are accompanied by explicit reasoning paths whose agreement with reference evidence can be systematically evaluated.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.14528 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.14528v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.14528 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.