# ChatKBQA: A Generate-then-Retrieve Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Fine-tuned Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08975 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08975/

## Key facts

- Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [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 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Are Key-Value Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14913/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08302/) (2023)
- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [Think-on-Graph: Deep and Responsible Reasoning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07697/) (2023)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03126/) (2016)
- [PullNet: Open Domain Question Answering with Iterative Retrieval on Knowledge Bases and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09537/) (2019)
- [Beyond I.I.D.: Three Levels of Generalization for Question Answering on Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07743/) (2020)
- [InstructUIE: Multi-task Instruction Tuning for Unified Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08085/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs (GraphRAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00309/) (2024)
- [FlashRAG: A Modular Toolkit for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13576/) (2024)
- [Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08426/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13958/) (2025)
- [KAG: Boosting LLMs in Professional Domains via Knowledge Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13731/) (2024)
- [MindSearch: Mimicking Human Minds Elicits Deep AI Searcher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20183/) (2024)
- [FiDeLiS: Faithful Reasoning in Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13873/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Recent Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06852/) (2024)
- [Graph Machine Learning in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14928/) (2024)
- [StructLM: Towards Building Generalist Models for Structured Knowledge Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16671/) (2024)
- [Understand What LLM Needs: Dual Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18676/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18537/) (2024)
- [From Natural Language to SQL: Review of LLM-based Text-to-SQL Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01066/) (2024)
- [OneGen: Efficient One-Pass Unified Generation and Retrieval for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05152/) (2024)
- [Human-inspired Perspectives: A Survey on AI Long-term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00489/) (2024)
- [Diagnosing and Addressing Pitfalls in KG-RAG Datasets: Toward More Reliable Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23495/) (2025)
- [Grounding LLM Reasoning with Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13247/) (2025)
- [GraphWalker: Agentic Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Synthetic Trajectory Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28533/) (2026)
- [mmRAG: A Modular Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Text, Tables, and Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11180/) (2025)
- [Search-on-Graph: Iterative Informed Navigation for Large Language Model Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08825/) (2025)
- [Combining LLMs and Knowledge Graphs to Reduce Hallucinations in Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04181/) (2024)
- [Aligning Knowledge Graphs and Language Models for Factual Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13411/) (2025)
- [Explainable Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) with KG-SMILE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03626/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Retrieval Systems with Inference-Time Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17860/) (2025)
- [CLEAR-KGQA: Clarification-Enhanced Ambiguity Resolution for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09665/) (2025)
- [MultiRAG: A Knowledge-guided Framework for Mitigating Hallucination in Multi-source Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03553/) (2025)
- [ProgRAG: Hallucination-Resistant Progressive Retrieval and Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10240/) (2025)
- [KBQA-R1: Reinforcing Large Language Models for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10999/) (2025)
- [MGSA: Multi-Granularity Graph Structure Attention for Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10294/) (2024)
- [FRASE: Structured Representations for Generalizable SPARQL Query Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22144/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions over large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), which can be summarized into two crucial steps: knowledge retrieval and semantic parsing. However, three core challenges remain: inefficient knowledge retrieval, mistakes of retrieval adversely impacting semantic parsing, and the complexity of previous KBQA methods. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ChatKBQA, a novel and simple generate-then-retrieve KBQA framework, which proposes first generating the logical form with fine-tuned LLMs, then retrieving and replacing entities and relations with an unsupervised retrieval method, to improve both generation and retrieval more directly. Experimental results show that ChatKBQA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on standard KBQA datasets, WebQSP, and CWQ. This work can also be regarded as a new paradigm for combining LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) for interpretable and knowledge-required question answering. Our code is publicly available.