SimGRAG: Leveraging Similar Subgraphs for Knowledge Graphs Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Yuzheng Cai, Zhenyue Guo, YiWen Pei, WanRui Bian, Weiguo Zheng


Abstract
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive versatility across various tasks. To eliminate their hallucinations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful approach, leveraging external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs). In this paper, we study the task of KG-driven RAG and propose a novel Similar Graph Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SimGRAG) method. It effectively addresses the challenge of aligning query texts and KG structures through a two-stage process: (1) query-to-pattern, which uses an LLM to transform queries into a desired graph pattern, and (2) pattern-to-subgraph, which quantifies the alignment between the pattern and candidate subgraphs using a graph semantic distance (GSD) metric. We also develop an optimized retrieval algorithm that efficiently identifies the top-k subgraphs within 1-second on a 10-million-scale KG. Extensive experiments show that SimGRAG outperforms state-of-the-art KG-driven RAG methods in both question answering and fact verification. Our code is available at https://github.com/YZ-Cai/SimGRAG.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.163
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
3139–3158
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.163/
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Cite (ACL):
Yuzheng Cai, Zhenyue Guo, YiWen Pei, WanRui Bian, and Weiguo Zheng. 2025. SimGRAG: Leveraging Similar Subgraphs for Knowledge Graphs Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 3139–3158, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SimGRAG: Leveraging Similar Subgraphs for Knowledge Graphs Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Cai et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.163.pdf