# From Chains to Graphs: Self-Structured Reasoning for General-Domain LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [Think-on-Graph: Deep and Responsible Reasoning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07697/) (2023)
- [Faithful Logical Reasoning via Symbolic Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18357/) (2024)
- [Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14211/) (2024)
- [From LSAT: The Progress and Challenges of Complex Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00648/) (2021)
- [Implicit Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02350/) (2025)
- [GraphReason: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models through A Graph-Based Verification Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09267/) (2023)
- [LLMs for Customized Marketing Content Generation and Evaluation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17863/) (2025)
- [MKG-Rank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Knowledge Graph for Multilingual Medical Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16131/) (2025)

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

- [From Chains to DAGs: Probing the Graph Structure of Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17593/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning ability in open-domain question answering, yet their reasoning processes are typically linear and often logically inconsistent. In contrast, real-world reasoning requires integrating multiple premises and solving subproblems in parallel. Existing methods, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), express reasoning in a linear textual form, which may appear coherent but frequently leads to inconsistent conclusions. Recent approaches rely on externally provided graphs and do not explore how LLMs can construct and use their own graph-structured reasoning, particularly in open-domain QA. To fill this gap, we novelly explore graph-structured reasoning of LLMs in general-domain question answering. We propose Self-Graph Reasoning (SGR), a framework that enables LLMs to explicitly represent their reasoning process as a structured graph before producing the final answer. We further construct a graph-structured reasoning dataset that merges multiple candidate reasoning graphs into refined graph structures for model training. Experiments on five QA benchmarks across both general and specialized domains show that SGR consistently improves reasoning consistency and yields a 17.74% gain over the base model. The LLaMA-3.3-70B model fine-tuned with SGR performs comparably to GPT-4o and surpasses Claude-3.5-Haiku, demonstrating the effectiveness of graph-structured reasoning.