@inproceedings{shi-etal-2026-ng,
title = "{NG}-Router: Graph-Supervised Multi-Agent Collaboration for Nutrition Question Answering",
author = "Shi, Kaiwen and
Zhang, Zheyuan and
Yuan, Zhengqing and
Murugesan, Keerthiram and
Galassi, Vincent and
Zhang, Chuxu and
Ye, Yanfang",
editor = "Demberg, Vera and
Inui, Kentaro and
Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = mar,
year = "2026",
address = "Rabat, Morocco",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.352/",
pages = "7508--7527",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-380-7",
abstract = "Diet plays a central role in human health, and Nutrition Question Answering (QA) offers a promising path toward personalized dietary guidance and the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases. However, existing methods face two fundamental challenges: the limited reasoning capacity of single-agent systems and the complexity of designing effective multi-agent architectures, as well as contextual overload that hinders accurate decision-making. We introduce Nutritional-Graph Router (NG-Router), a novel framework that formulates nutritional QA as a supervised, knowledge-graph{--}guided multi-agent collaboration problem. NG-Router integrates agent nodes into heterogeneous knowledge graphs and employs a graph neural network to learn task-aware routing distributions over agents, leveraging soft supervision derived from empirical agent performance. To further address contextual overload, we propose a gradient-based subgraph retrieval mechanism that identifies salient evidence during training, thereby enhancing multi-hop and relational reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbone models demonstrate that NG-Router consistently outperforms both single-agent and ensemble baselines, offering a principled approach to domain-aware multi-agent reasoning for complex nutritional health tasks."
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<abstract>Diet plays a central role in human health, and Nutrition Question Answering (QA) offers a promising path toward personalized dietary guidance and the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases. However, existing methods face two fundamental challenges: the limited reasoning capacity of single-agent systems and the complexity of designing effective multi-agent architectures, as well as contextual overload that hinders accurate decision-making. We introduce Nutritional-Graph Router (NG-Router), a novel framework that formulates nutritional QA as a supervised, knowledge-graph–guided multi-agent collaboration problem. NG-Router integrates agent nodes into heterogeneous knowledge graphs and employs a graph neural network to learn task-aware routing distributions over agents, leveraging soft supervision derived from empirical agent performance. To further address contextual overload, we propose a gradient-based subgraph retrieval mechanism that identifies salient evidence during training, thereby enhancing multi-hop and relational reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbone models demonstrate that NG-Router consistently outperforms both single-agent and ensemble baselines, offering a principled approach to domain-aware multi-agent reasoning for complex nutritional health tasks.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T NG-Router: Graph-Supervised Multi-Agent Collaboration for Nutrition Question Answering
%A Shi, Kaiwen
%A Zhang, Zheyuan
%A Yuan, Zhengqing
%A Murugesan, Keerthiram
%A Galassi, Vincent
%A Zhang, Chuxu
%A Ye, Yanfang
%Y Demberg, Vera
%Y Inui, Kentaro
%Y Marquez, Lluís
%S Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 March
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Rabat, Morocco
%@ 979-8-89176-380-7
%F shi-etal-2026-ng
%X Diet plays a central role in human health, and Nutrition Question Answering (QA) offers a promising path toward personalized dietary guidance and the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases. However, existing methods face two fundamental challenges: the limited reasoning capacity of single-agent systems and the complexity of designing effective multi-agent architectures, as well as contextual overload that hinders accurate decision-making. We introduce Nutritional-Graph Router (NG-Router), a novel framework that formulates nutritional QA as a supervised, knowledge-graph–guided multi-agent collaboration problem. NG-Router integrates agent nodes into heterogeneous knowledge graphs and employs a graph neural network to learn task-aware routing distributions over agents, leveraging soft supervision derived from empirical agent performance. To further address contextual overload, we propose a gradient-based subgraph retrieval mechanism that identifies salient evidence during training, thereby enhancing multi-hop and relational reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbone models demonstrate that NG-Router consistently outperforms both single-agent and ensemble baselines, offering a principled approach to domain-aware multi-agent reasoning for complex nutritional health tasks.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.352/
%P 7508-7527
Markdown (Informal)
[NG-Router: Graph-Supervised Multi-Agent Collaboration for Nutrition Question Answering](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.352/) (Shi et al., EACL 2026)
ACL