Stepwise Reasoning Enhancement for LLMs via External Subgraph Generation

Large language models have shown strong performance in natural language generation and downstream reasoning tasks, but they still struggle with logical consistency, factual grounding, and interpretability in complex multi-step reasoning. To address these limitations, this paper proposes SGR, a stepwise reasoning enhancement framework that integrates large language models with external knowledge graphs through query-relevant subgraph generation. Given an input question, SGR first extracts key entities, relations, and constraints to construct a structured schema, then retrieves compact subgraphs from a knowledge graph using schema-guided querying. The generated subgraphs provide explicit relational evidence that guides the language model through step-by-step reasoning. In addition, SGR combines direct Cypher-based reasoning with collaborative reasoning integration, allowing candidate answers from multiple reasoning paths to be validated and aggregated according to both model confidence and graph consistency. Experiments on benchmark datasets including CWQ, WebQSP, GrailQA, and KQA Pro demonstrate that SGR improves reasoning accuracy and Hits@1 performance over standard prompting and several knowledge-enhanced baselines. Ablation studies further show that schema guidance and Neo4j-based retrieval are both crucial to the effectiveness of the framework. These results indicate that dynamically generated external subgraphs can improve the accuracy, robustness, and interpretability of LLM-based reasoning.

A Stepwise-Enhanced Reasoning Framework for Large Language Models Based on External Subgraph Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks in recent years, including machine translation, text generation, and question answering. As their applications extend to increasingly complex scenarios, however, LLMs continue to face challenges in tasks that require deep reasoning and logical inference. In particular, models trained on large scale textual corpora may incorporate noisy or irrelevant information during generation, which can lead to incorrect predictions or outputs that are inconsistent with factual knowledge. To address this limitation, we propose a stepwise reasoning enhancement framework for LLMs based on external subgraph generation, termed SGR. The proposed framework dynamically constructs query relevant subgraphs from external knowledge bases and leverages their semantic structure to guide the reasoning process. By performing reasoning in a step by step manner over structured subgraphs, SGR reduces the influence of noisy information and improves reasoning accuracy. Specifically, the framework first generates an external subgraph tailored to the input query, then guides the model to conduct multi step reasoning grounded in the subgraph, and finally integrates multiple reasoning paths to produce the final answer. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SGR consistently outperforms strong baselines, indicating its effectiveness in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.