AdaPath: Query-Adaptive Path-Finding via Path-Bank for Multi-Hop Implicit Biomedical KGQA

Jun Hyeong Kim, Dongki Kim, Yinhua Piao, Sung Ju Hwang


Abstract
Path-finding over knowledge graphs has become an effective way to ground LLM reasoning on multi-hop questions. However, biomedical QA introduces two distinct challenges that general-domain methods are not designed for: (i) queries do not expose intermediate reasoning and can be answered through multiple valid pathways, and (ii) biomedical knowledge graphs are densely connected, so path-finding methods easily take wrong turns. To address these challenges, we propose AdaPath, a path-finding framework that retrieves query-adaptive meta-paths from Path-Bank, which captures both query semantics and biomedical knowledge graph structure. AdaPath provides the missing cues in biomedical queries while effectively pruning dense knowledge graph neighborhoods during multi-hop reasoning. We further release BioStrat-QA, a biomedical KGQA benchmark that stratifies multi-hop queries by how much intermediate reasoning they expose. Across biomedical KGQA benchmarks, AdaPath consistently outperforms baselines, sustaining meaningful path-finding even when multi-hop queries expose less surface information. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jun-Hyeong-Kim/AdaPath.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2395
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
54435–54459
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2395/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Jun Hyeong Kim, Dongki Kim, Yinhua Piao, and Sung Ju Hwang. 2026. AdaPath: Query-Adaptive Path-Finding via Path-Bank for Multi-Hop Implicit Biomedical KGQA. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 54435–54459, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AdaPath: Query-Adaptive Path-Finding via Path-Bank for Multi-Hop Implicit Biomedical KGQA (Kim et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2395.pdf