KG-Infused RAG: Augmenting Corpus-Based RAG with External Knowledge Graphs

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual accuracy by grounding responses in external knowledge. However, existing methods typically rely on a single source, either unstructured text or structured knowledge. Moreover, they lack cognitively inspired mechanisms for activating relevant knowledge. To address these issues, we propose KG-Infused RAG, a framework that integrates KGs into RAG systems to implement spreading activation, a cognitive process that enables concept association and inference. KG-Infused RAG retrieves KG facts, expands the query accordingly, and enhances generation by combining corpus passages with structured facts, enabling interpretable, multi-source retrieval grounded in semantic structure. We further improve KG-Infused RAG via preference learning on sampled key stages in the pipeline. Experiments on five QA benchmarks show that KG-Infused RAG consistently outperforms vanilla RAG (by 3.8% to 13.8%). Additionally, when integrated into Self-RAG, KG-Infused RAG brings further performance gains, demonstrating its effectiveness and versatility as a plug-and-play enhancement module for corpus-based RAG methods.

Chain of Thought Prompting Elicits Knowledge Augmentation

The knowledge-augmented deep learning paradigm refers to a paradigm in which domain knowledge is identified and integrated into deep models. Conventional methods typically employ task-specific approaches to gather external knowledge from various sources. In contrast, large language models are extensively pre-trained and can serve as a comprehensive source of external knowledge. In this paper, we propose CoT-KA, a Chain-of-Thought-based method that augments knowledge for deep learning. CoT-KA avoids the need for additional knowledge retrieval or knowledge reasoning models, as required in conventional augmentation methods. Our results demonstrate that CoT-KA outperforms both pure CoT-based methods and the non-augmented method across the majority of eleven publicly available benchmarks for various reasoning tasks.