Juelu Zhang

Author directory

2026

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables LLMs to access external knowledge for answering knowledge-intensive questions. For complex multi-hop questions, multi-turn retrieval-augmented reasoning extends RAG into an iterative process that repeatedly searches for and integrates evidence across documents. However, existing reinforcement-learning (RL) approaches for agentic RAG are typically optimized with final-answer rewards, which provide sparse supervision and overlook whether the model actually retrieves the required evidence chain. We present GTA-RAG, a graph-trajectory-augmented RL framework for multi-turn retrieval-augmented reasoning. From an entity–document graph, we sample connected document paths, synthesize multi-hop QA trajectories, and validate them with the deployed retriever to obtain executable trajectory-level supervision. We then optimize the retrieval policy with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a trajectory-guided reward that encourages both accurate answers and acquisition of target evidence documents, followed by answer-reward training on natural QA instances. Experiments on three multi-hop and two simple QA benchmarks show that GTA-RAG consistently outperforms RL-based RAG baselines with both Qwen2.5-3B and Qwen2.5-7B backbones, while substantially improving evidence-chain coverage. Our code is available at https://github.com/cjcj46262/GTA-RAG
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning ability but are constrained by outdated knowledge and hallucinations. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can help mitigate these limitations by providing structured relational knowledge and capturing global multi-entity, multi-hop dependencies beyond linear text. However, existing KG-enhanced LLM reasoning methods mostly rely on hop-by-hop textual traversal, rather than making multi-hop decisions with a broader perspective as humans do, thus underusing the structural advantages of KGs. This leads to myopic exploration and fragmented reasoning, wasting effort on irrelevant entities while potentially missing critical ones. To address these limitations, we propose Foresight-on-Graph (FoG), a novel framework that introduces visual relation graphs to expand the reasoning horizon at each step. FoG enables Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to simultaneously attend to multi-entity, multi-hop contexts, supporting foresighted planning and more efficient graph exploration. To facilitate effective visual reasoning, we design relation-based fuzzy matching and union-find algorithms to filter out irrelevant relations and coarsen the graph, condensing subgraphs with millions of entities into compact relation graphs with only tens of nodes. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FoG consistently outperforms existing methods while significantly improving reasoning efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/hyworrywart/FoG.