# GraphRAFT: Retrieval Augmented Fine-Tuning for Knowledge Graphs on Graph Databases

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 47 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)
- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Knowledge-graph and structured-knowledge RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/knowledge-graph-and-structured-knowledge-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [Do Transformers Really Perform Bad for Graph Representation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05234/) (2021)
- [RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10131/) (2024)
- [Generative Representational Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09906/) (2024)
- [Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07763/) (2024)
- [G-Retriever: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07630/) (2024)
- [Grammar-Constrained Decoding for Structured NLP Tasks without Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13971/) (2023)
- [Pure Transformers are Powerful Graph Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02505/) (2022)
- [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)
- [GreaseLM: Graph REASoning Enhanced Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08860/) (2022)
- [Open Domain Question Answering Using Early Fusion of Knowledge Bases and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00782/) (2018)
- [Learning on Large-scale Text-attributed Graphs via Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14709/) (2022)
- [Harnessing Explanations: LLM-to-LM Interpreter for Enhanced Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19523/) (2023)
- [GNN-RAG: Graph Neural Retrieval for Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20139/) (2024)
- [Guiding LLMs The Right Way: Fast, Non-Invasive Constrained Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06988/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-Driven CoT: Exploring Faithful Reasoning in LLMs for Knowledge-intensive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13259/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Knowledge Graphs for Customer Service Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17723/) (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)
- [A Survey on Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: Methods, Challenges and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11644/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Autofocus Retrieval: An Effective Pipeline for Multi-Hop Question Answering With Semi-Structured Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09246/) (2025)
- [LLP: LLM-Based Product Pricing in E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09347/) (2025)
- [GDS Agent for Graph Algorithmic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20637/) (2025)
- [LLM+Graph@VLDB'2025 Workshop Summary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02861/) (2026)
- [RAS: Reflection-Augmented Scaling with In-Context Learning for Executable Cypher Query Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22937/) (2026)
- [When Thinking Before Retrieval Hurts: TraceBound Diagnostics for Adaptive Knowledge-Graph Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24800/) (2026)
- [Knowledge Graphs as Files: An Agent Harness Where Tool Creation and Tool Use Co-Evolve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18616/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models have shown remarkable language processing and reasoning ability but are prone to hallucinate when asked about private data. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) retrieves relevant data that fit into an LLM's context window and prompts the LLM for an answer. GraphRAG extends this approach to structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and questions regarding entities multiple hops away. The majority of recent GraphRAG methods either overlook the retrieval step or have ad hoc retrieval processes that are abstract or inefficient. This prevents them from being adopted when the KGs are stored in graph databases supporting graph query languages. In this work, we present GraphRAFT, a retrieve-and-reason framework that finetunes LLMs to generate provably correct Cypher queries to retrieve high-quality subgraph contexts and produce accurate answers. Our method is the first such solution that can be taken off-the-shelf and used on KGs stored in native graph DBs. Benchmarks suggest that our method is sample-efficient and scales with the availability of training data. Our method achieves significantly better results than all state-of-the-art models across all four standard metrics on two challenging Q&As on large text-attributed KGs.