# Exemplar-Guided Planing: Enhanced LLM Agent for KGQA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15283 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15283/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 22 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [The Faiss library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08281/) (2024)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00959/) (2022)
- [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)
- [DecAF: Joint Decoding of Answers and Logical Forms for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00063/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Plan-on-Graph: Self-Correcting Adaptive Planning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23875/) (2024)
- [Few-shot In-context Learning for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01750/) (2023)
- [TIARA: Multi-grained Retrieval for Robust Question Answering over Large Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12925/) (2022)
- [ChatKBQA: A Generate-then-Retrieve Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Fine-tuned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08975/) (2023)
- [Interactive-KBQA: Multi-Turn Interactions for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15131/) (2024)
- [SymAgent: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Learning Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03283/) (2025)
- [Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02118/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CoG: Controllable Graph Reasoning via Relational Blueprints and Failure-Aware Refinement over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11047/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) as interactive agents show significant promise in Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) but often struggle with the semantic gap between natural language queries and structured knowledge graph (KG) representations. This leads to suboptimal planning and inefficient exploration on KG, while training-free approaches often underutilize valuable reasoning patterns in training data. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework, Exemplar-Guided Planning (EGP), which enhances the planning capabilities of LLM agents for KGQA. EGP first preprocesses the training set questions via entity templating to normalize semantic variations. It then retrieves highly similar exemplary questions and their successful reasoning paths from this preprocessed set using semantic embeddings and an efficient FAISS index. These retrieved exemplars dynamically guide the LLM's planning process in two key phases: (1) Task Decomposition, by aligning generated sub-objectives with proven reasoning steps, and (2) Relation Exploration, by providing high-quality auxiliary information to improve relation pruning accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a Smart Lookahead mechanism during relation exploration to improve efficiency by preemptively exploring promising paths and potentially terminating exploration earlier. We apply EGP to the Plan-on-Graph (PoG) framework, termed PoG-EGP. Extensive experiments on two real-world KGQA datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, demonstrate that PoG-EGP significantly improves over the baseline PoG system and other compared methods.