# Reinforcement Recommendation Reasoning through Knowledge Graphs for Explanation Path Quality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04954/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in LLM reasoning for recommendation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2022.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [LLM reasoning for recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/llm-reasoning-for-recommendation/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [LLM-Powered Explanations: Unraveling Recommendations Through Subgraph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15859/) (2024)
- [Knowledge is Power, Understanding is Impact: Utility and Beyond Goals, Explanation Quality, and Fairness in Path Reasoning Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05944/) (2023)
- [LightKG: Efficient Knowledge-Aware Recommendations with Simplified GNN Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10347/) (2025)
- [Unveiling Optimal SDG Pathways: An Innovative Approach Leveraging Graph Pruning and Intent Graph for Effective Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11741/) (2023)
- [The Utility of LLMs in Recommender Systems Explanation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01627/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Numerous Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are being created to make Recommender Systems (RSs) not only intelligent but also knowledgeable. Integrating a KG in the recommendation process allows the underlying model to extract reasoning paths between recommended products and already experienced products from the KG. These paths can be leveraged to generate textual explanations to be provided to the user for a given recommendation. However, the existing explainable recommendation approaches based on KG merely optimize the selected reasoning paths for product relevance, without considering any user-level property of the paths for explanation. In this paper, we propose a series of quantitative properties that monitor the quality of the reasoning paths from an explanation perspective, based on recency, popularity, and diversity. We then combine in- and post-processing approaches to optimize for both recommendation quality and reasoning path quality. Experiments on three public data sets show that our approaches significantly increase reasoning path quality according to the proposed properties, while preserving recommendation quality. Source code, data sets, and KGs are available at https://tinyurl.com/bdbfzr4n.