# Knowledge-Driven CoT: Exploring Faithful Reasoning in LLMs for Knowledge-intensive Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13259 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13259/

## Key facts

- Cited by 97 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 38 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03350/) (2022)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12813/) (2023)
- [Selection-Inference: Exploiting Large Language Models for Interpretable Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09712/) (2022)
- [Faithful Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13379/) (2023)
- [Rethinking with Retrieval: Faithful Large Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00303/) (2022)
- [Faithful Reasoning Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14271/) (2022)
- [Multi-hop Reading Comprehension through Question Decomposition and Rescoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02916/) (2019)
- [Improving Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering by Learning Intermediate Supervision Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03737/) (2021)
- [WebGLM: Towards An Efficient Web-Enhanced Question Answering System with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07906/) (2023)
- [DecAF: Joint Decoding of Answers and Logical Forms for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00063/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 97)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08921/) (2024)
- [Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15402/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09210/) (2023)
- [GNN-RAG: Graph Neural Retrieval for Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20139/) (2024)
- [The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03205/) (2024)
- [Simple Is Effective: The Roles of Graphs and Large Language Models in Knowledge-Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20724/) (2024)
- [PhyT2V: LLM-Guided Iterative Self-Refinement for Physics-Grounded Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00596/) (2024)
- [Plan-on-Graph: Self-Correcting Adaptive Planning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23875/) (2024)
- [A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05668/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02226/) (2025)
- [Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15676/) (2024)
- [Graph-constrained Reasoning: Faithful Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13080/) (2024)
- [In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04338/) (2025)
- [FiDeLiS: Faithful Reasoning in Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13873/) (2024)
- [Causal Prompting: Debiasing Large Language Model Prompting based on Front-Door Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02738/) (2024)
- [How Interpretable are Reasoning Explanations from Prompting Large Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11863/) (2024)
- [ArchRAG: Attributed Community-based Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09891/) (2025)
- [HyKGE: A Hypothesis Knowledge Graph Enhanced Framework for Accurate and Reliable Medical LLMs Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15883/) (2023)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18537/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Reinforcement Learning-based Agentic Search: Foundations, Roles, Optimizations, Evaluations, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16724/) (2025)
- [KnowPO: Knowledge-aware Preference Optimization for Controllable Knowledge Selection in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03297/) (2024)
- [Decoding on Graphs: Faithful and Sound Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs through Generation of Well-Formed Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18415/) (2024)
- [Dual Reasoning: A GNN-LLM Collaborative Framework for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01145/) (2024)
- [Graph-based Approaches and Functionalities in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10499/) (2025)
- [LLMs Know What They Need: Leveraging a Missing Information Guided Framework to Empower Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14043/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs through Evidence Pattern Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02175/) (2024)
- [Ontology-Guided Reverse Thinking Makes Large Language Models Stronger on Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11491/) (2025)
- [EffiQA: Efficient Question-Answering with Strategic Multi-Model Collaboration on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01238/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning ability in various downstream tasks. Even so, suffering from hallucinations and the inability to access external knowledge, LLMs often come with incorrect or unfaithful intermediate reasoning steps, especially in the context of answering knowledge-intensive tasks such as KBQA. To alleviate this issue, we propose a framework called Knowledge-Driven Chain-of-Thought (KD-CoT) to verify and modify reasoning traces in CoT via interaction with external knowledge, and thus overcome the hallucinations and error propagation. Concretely, we formulate the CoT rationale process of LLMs into a structured multi-round QA format. In each round, LLMs interact with a QA system that retrieves external knowledge and produce faithful reasoning traces based on retrieved precise answers. The structured CoT reasoning of LLMs is facilitated by our developed KBQA CoT collection, which serves as in-context learning demonstrations and can also be utilized as feedback augmentation to train a robust retriever. Extensive experiments on WebQSP and ComplexWebQuestion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed KD-CoT in task-solving reasoning generation, which outperforms the vanilla CoT ICL with an absolute success rate of 8.0% and 5.1%. Furthermore, our proposed feedback-augmented retriever outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines for retrieving knowledge, achieving significant improvement in Hit and recall performance. Our code and data are released on https://github.com/AdelWang/KD-CoT/tree/main.