Djellel Difallah

Author directory

2026

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly combined with knowledge graphs (KGs) to ground reasoning in structured evidence. However, most LLM-based KGQA methods rely on traversing existing graph edges and become unreliable when reasoning paths are broken by missing facts. Alternatives that ask LLMs to generate missing knowledge risk introducing hallucinated evidence. We introduce XoG (eXplore-over-Graph), a framework for multi-hop question answering over incomplete KGs that recovers missing reasoning paths from learned graph structure rather than LLM parametric knowledge. XoG combines type-level entity–relation statistics to identify candidate relations with KG embeddings to retrieve plausible missing entities, using the LLM as a semantic selector and reasoner. These mechanisms are integrated into an iterative planning–exploration–reasoning process. Experiments on WebQSP, CWQ, and the Wikidata-based BRINK benchmark show that XoG remains competitive on complete KGs and consistently outperforms comparable methods without task-specific KGQA training under KG incompleteness. These gains persist across multiple LLM backbones, indicating that stronger LLMs alone do not resolve missing graph evidence. XoG also reduces LLM token consumption by up to 33% compared with a closely related planning-based approach.
Recent advancements in large language models have introduced new capabilities for reasoning over structured data, particularly through program-aided tools that can analyze tables. However, many existing methods address single-table scenarios or assume that the relevant tables are already provided. In practice, users often issue complex data exploration queries over entire databases, where relevant information may be distributed across multiple relations. In this work, we introduce DBRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework tailored for multi-table question answering. DBRAG first retrieves candidate tables using an offline table index, enriches their summaries with query-relevant rows, and uses an LLM to rerank the candidates. A program-aided reasoner then selects the required tables and executes operations over their full contents, keeping the initial prompt context compact. Experiments on the Spider, GeoQuery, and ATIS datasets used in this study demonstrate improvements in table retrieval and multi-table question answering.