SKRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Guided by Reasoning Skeletons over Knowledge Graphs

摘要

In specialized domains such as space science and utilization, question answering (QA) systems are required to perform complex multi-fact reasoning over sparse knowledge graphs (KGs). Existing KG-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks often face challenges such as inefficient subgraph retrieval, limited reasoning capabilities, and high computational costs. These issues limit their effectiveness in specialized domains. In this paper, we propose SKRAG, a novel Skeleton-guided RAG framework for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA). SKRAG leverages a lightweight language model enhanced with the Finite State Machine (FSM) constraint to produce structurally grounded reasoning skeletons, which guide accurate subgraph retrieval. The retrieved subgraph is then used to prompt a general large language model (LLM) for answer generation. We also introduce SSUQA, a KGQA dataset in the space science and utilization domain. Experiments show that SKRAG outperforms strong baselines on SSUQA and two general-domain benchmarks, demonstrating its adaptability and practical effectiveness.