Yongqiang Liu


2025

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DS-MHP: Improving Chain-of-Thought through Dynamic Subgraph-Guided Multi-Hop Path
Yongqiang Liu | Qiyao Peng | Binrong Liu | Hongtao Liu | XueWei Li | Wenjun Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language tasks, with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhancing reasoning through step-by-step decomposition. However, CoT struggles in knowledge-intensive tasks with multiple entities and implicit multi-hop relations, failing to connect entities systematically in zero-shot settings. Existing knowledge graph methods, limited by static structures, lack adaptability in complex scenarios. We propose DS-MHP, a zero-shot framework to enhance LLM reasoning in multi-entity relation tasks. DS-MHP operates in three stages: 1) constructing query-specific subgraphs by extracting entities and relations; 2) generating and refining multi-hop paths using a hybrid strategy of Breadth-First Search, greedy expansion, and LLM supplementation; and 3) guiding LLMs with subgraphs and paths, aggregating answers via majority voting. Evaluated on 12 datasets spanning commonsense, logical, symbolic, and arithmetic reasoning, DS-MHP outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art methods in nearly all benchmarks. It achieves overall average accuracy increases of 3.9% on Mistral-7B and 3.6% on GPT-3.5 Turbo compared to SOTA, with significant gains in logical and symbolic reasoning. Additionally, DS-MHP reduces runtime and LLM calls compared to SOTA, enhancing computational efficiency. These improvements demonstrate DS-MHP’s superior reasoning accuracy, explainability, and efficiency in complex multi-entity tasks.