SKRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Guided by Reasoning Skeletons over Knowledge Graphs

Xiaotong Xu, Yizhao Wang, Yunfei Liu, Shengyang Li


Abstract
In specialized domains such as space science and utilization, question answering (QA) systems are required to perform complex multi-fact reasoning over sparse knowledge graphs (KGs). Existing KG-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks often face challenges such as inefficient subgraph retrieval, limited reasoning capabilities, and high computational costs. These issues limit their effectiveness in specialized domains. In this paper, we propose SKRAG, a novel Skeleton-guided RAG framework for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA). SKRAG leverages a lightweight language model enhanced with the Finite State Machine (FSM) constraint to produce structurally grounded reasoning skeletons, which guide accurate subgraph retrieval. The retrieved subgraph is then used to prompt a general large language model (LLM) for answer generation. We also introduce SSUQA, a KGQA dataset in the space science and utilization domain. Experiments show that SKRAG outperforms strong baselines on SSUQA and two general-domain benchmarks, demonstrating its adaptability and practical effectiveness.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.752
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13983–13994
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.752/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.752
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaotong Xu, Yizhao Wang, Yunfei Liu, and Shengyang Li. 2025. SKRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Guided by Reasoning Skeletons over Knowledge Graphs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 13983–13994, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SKRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Guided by Reasoning Skeletons over Knowledge Graphs (Xu et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.752.pdf
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