# GRAIL:Learning to Interact with Large Knowledge Graphs for Retrieval Augmented Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05498/

## 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 25 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 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, 25 of 25)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19437/) (2024)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08921/) (2024)
- [LightRAG: Simple and Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05779/) (2024)
- [LLaGA: Large Language and Graph Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08170/) (2024)
- [GNN-RAG: Graph Neural Retrieval for Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20139/) (2024)
- [GraphLLM: Boosting Graph Reasoning Ability of Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05845/) (2023)
- [Knowledge-Driven CoT: Exploring Faithful Reasoning in LLMs for Knowledge-intensive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13259/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13958/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Graph Meets Large Language Model: Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12399/) (2023)
- [Process Reward Models for LLM Agents: Practical Framework and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10325/) (2025)
- [SPA-RL: Reinforcing LLM Agents via Stepwise Progress Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20732/) (2025)
- [R1-Reward: Training Multimodal Reward Model Through Stable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02835/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graph-Augmented Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18846/) (2023)
- [From Novice to Expert: LLM Agent Policy Optimization via Step-wise Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03817/) (2024)
- [KG-Retriever: Efficient Knowledge Indexing for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05547/) (2024)
- [Scaling Knowledge Graph Construction through Synthetic Data Generation and Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16597/) (2024)

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

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Reinforcement Learning-based Agentic Search: Foundations, Roles, Optimizations, Evaluations, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16724/) (2025)
- [VisBrowse-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Native Search for Multimodal Browsing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16289/) (2026)
- [ACE-Router: Generalizing History-Aware Routing from MCP Tools to the Agent Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08276/) (2026)
- [From Completion to Editing: Unlocking Context-Aware Code Infilling via Search-and-Replace Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13384/) (2026)
- [ARK: Answer-Centric Retriever Tuning via KG-augmented Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16326/) (2025)
- [MemGround: Long-Term Memory Evaluation Kit for Large Language Models in Gamified Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14158/) (2026)
- [AtlasKV: Augmenting LLMs with Billion-Scale Knowledge Graphs in 20GB VRAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17934/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have exhibited remarkable performance across a wide range of domains. However, existing RAG approaches primarily operate on unstructured data and demonstrate limited capability in handling structured knowledge such as knowledge graphs. Meanwhile, current graph retrieval methods fundamentally struggle to capture holistic graph structures while simultaneously facing precision control challenges that manifest as either critical information gaps or excessive redundant connections, collectively undermining reasoning performance. To address this challenge, we propose GRAIL: Graph-Retrieval Augmented Interactive Learning, a framework designed to interact with large-scale graphs for retrieval-augmented reasoning. Specifically, GRAIL integrates LLM-guided random exploration with path filtering to establish a data synthesis pipeline, where a fine-grained reasoning trajectory is automatically generated for each task. Based on the synthesized data, we then employ a two-stage training process to learn a policy that dynamically decides the optimal actions at each reasoning step. The overall objective of precision-conciseness balance in graph retrieval is decoupled into fine-grained process-supervised rewards to enhance data efficiency and training stability. In practical deployment, GRAIL adopts an interactive retrieval paradigm, enabling the model to autonomously explore graph paths while dynamically balancing retrieval breadth and precision. Extensive experiments have shown that GRAIL achieves an average accuracy improvement of 21.01% and F1 improvement of 22.43% on three knowledge graph question-answering datasets. Our source code and datasets is available at https://github.com/Changgeww/GRAIL.