# Generative Subgraph Retrieval for Knowledge Graph-Grounded Dialog Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09350/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Predict then Propagate: Graph Neural Networks meet Personalized PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05997/) (2018)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07567/) (2021)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00904/) (2020)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [Generate rather than Retrieve: Large Language Models are Strong Context Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10063/) (2022)
- [Sparse, Dense, and Attentional Representations for Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00181/) (2020)
- [A Knowledge-Grounded Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01932/) (2017)
- [Scalable Multi-Hop Relational Reasoning for Knowledge-Aware Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00646/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Search Engines: Generating Substrings as Document Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10628/) (2022)
- [A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02743/) (2022)
- [Transfer Learning of Graph Neural Networks with Ego-graph Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05204/) (2020)
- [Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13296/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the State-of-the-Art of End-to-End Natural Language Generation: The E2E NLG Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07931/) (2019)
- [Learning to Select Knowledge for Response Generation in Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04911/) (2019)
- [JAKET: Joint Pre-training of Knowledge Graph and Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00796/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Graph-Augmented Abstractive Summarization with Semantic-Driven Cloze Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01159/) (2020)
- [Grounded Conversation Generation as Guided Traverses in Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02707/) (2019)
- [Structured Neural Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01824/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13958/) (2025)
- [DeepVideo-R1: Video Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Difficulty-aware Regressive GRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07464/) (2025)
- [Time is Not a Label: Continuous Phase Rotation for Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Agentic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11544/) (2026)
- [Improving LLM's Attachment to External Knowledge In Dialogue Generation Tasks Through Entity Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11946/) (2025)
- [Learning to Recommend Multi-Agent Subgraphs from Calling Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22209/) (2026)
- [Relevance-aware Multi-context Contrastive Decoding for Retrieval-augmented Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06050/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge graph-grounded dialog generation requires retrieving a dialog-relevant subgraph from the given knowledge base graph and integrating it with the dialog history. Previous works typically represent the graph using an external encoder, such as graph neural networks, and retrieve relevant triplets based on the similarity between single-vector representations of triplets and the dialog history. However, these external encoders fail to leverage the rich knowledge of pretrained language models, and the retrieval process is also suboptimal due to the information bottleneck caused by the single-vector abstraction of the dialog history. In this work, we propose Dialog generation with Generative Subgraph Retrieval (DialogGSR), which retrieves relevant knowledge subgraphs by directly generating their token sequences on top of language models. For effective generative subgraph retrieval, we introduce two key methods: (i) structure-aware knowledge graph linearization with self-supervised graph-specific tokens and (ii) graph-constrained decoding utilizing graph structural proximity-based entity informativeness scores for valid and relevant generative retrieval. DialogGSR achieves state-of-the-art performance in knowledge graph-grounded dialog generation, as demonstrated on OpenDialKG and KOMODIS datasets.