Is Multi-Hop Reasoning Really Explainable? Towards Benchmarking Reasoning Interpretability
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Abstract (arXiv)
Multi-hop reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to obtain more interpretable link prediction. However, we find in experiments that many paths given by these models are actually unreasonable, while little works have been done on interpretability evaluation for them. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to quantitatively evaluate the interpretability of multi-hop reasoning models so as to advance their development. In specific, we define three metrics including path recall, local interpretability, and global interpretability for evaluation, and design an approximate strategy to calculate them using the interpretability scores of rules. Furthermore, we manually annotate all possible rules and establish a Benchmark to detect the Interpretability of Multi-hop Reasoning (BIMR). In experiments, we run nine baselines on our benchmark. The experimental results show that the interpretability of current multi-hop reasoning models is less satisfactory and is still far from the upper bound given by our benchmark. Moreover, the rule-based models outperform the multi-hop reasoning models in terms of performance and interpretability, which points to a direction for future research, i.e., we should investigate how to better incorporate rule information into the multi-hop reasoning model. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/BIMR.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 14 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2021.
Builds on
14 of 27 references.
References · 14
- 2017Convolutional 2D Knowledge Graph Embeddingscited by 729
- 2017DeepPath: A Reinforcement Learning Method for Knowledge Graph Reasoningcited by 265
- 2019DRUM: End-To-End Differentiable Rule Mining On Knowledge Graphscited by 173
- 2017Go for a Walk and Arrive at the Answer: Reasoning Over Paths in Knowledge Bases using Reinforcement Learningcited by 161
- 2017End-to-End Differentiable Provingcited by 159
- 2018Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Reward Shapingcited by 102
- 2020Learning Reasoning Strategies in End-to-End Differentiable Provingcited by 60
- 2020Learning to Explain: Datasets and Models for Identifying Valid Reasoning Chains in Multihop Question-Answeringcited by 49
- 2018M-Walk: Learning to Walk over Graphs using Monte Carlo Tree Searchcited by 34
- 2018Variational Knowledge Graph Reasoningcited by 27
- 2020Dynamic Anticipation and Completion for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Sparse Knowledge Graphcited by 26
- 2019Collaborative Policy Learning for Open Knowledge Graph Reasoningcited by 18
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 1; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
10 papers.
- 2021Explainable Biomedical Recommendations via Reinforcement Learning Reasoning on Knowledge Graphscited by 7
- 2023KoRC: Knowledge oriented Reading Comprehension Benchmark for Deep Text Understandingcited by 7
- 2022SQUIRE: A Sequence-to-sequence Framework for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Reasoningcited by 6
- 2025RGAR: Recurrence Generation-augmented Retrieval for Factual-aware Medical Question Answeringcited by 5
- 2023ReOnto: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Biomedical Relation Extractioncited by 4
- 2024Untangle the KNOT: Interweaving Conflicting Knowledge and Reasoning Skills in Large Language Modelscited by 3
- 2025Large Language Model-Enhanced Symbolic Reasoning for Knowledge Base Completioncited by 2
- 2026Theseus in the Graph: Towards Traceable Multi-Hop Graph Navigationcited by 1
- 2023Emulating the Human Mind: A Neural-symbolic Link Prediction Model with Fast and Slow Reasoning and Filtered Rulescited by 0
- 2025Enhancing Serendipity Recommendation System by Constructing Dynamic User Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Theseus in the Graph: Towards Traceable Multi-Hop Graph Navigation13 Sep 2026
- 2025Enhancing Serendipity Recommendation System by Constructing Dynamic User Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models6 Aug 2025
- 2025RGAR: Recurrence Generation-augmented Retrieval for Factual-aware Medical Question Answering19 Feb 2025
- 2025Large Language Model-Enhanced Symbolic Reasoning for Knowledge Base Completion2 Jan 2025
- 2024Untangle the KNOT: Interweaving Conflicting Knowledge and Reasoning Skills in Large Language Models4 Apr 2024
- 2023Emulating the Human Mind: A Neural-symbolic Link Prediction Model with Fast and Slow Reasoning and Filtered Rules21 Oct 2023
- 2023ReOnto: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Biomedical Relation Extraction4 Sep 2023
- 2023KoRC: Knowledge oriented Reading Comprehension Benchmark for Deep Text Understanding6 Jul 2023
- 2022SQUIRE: A Sequence-to-sequence Framework for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning17 Jan 2022
- 2021Explainable Biomedical Recommendations via Reinforcement Learning Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs20 Nov 2021