D-RAG: Differentiable Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions based on knowledge graphs. Recent approaches apply the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm to incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task, where a retriever selects a question-related subgraph and an LLM-based generator is then adopted to predict answers based on the retrieved subgraph. However, the subgraph selection process is non-differentiable, preventing end-to-end training of the retriever and the generator, which leads to sub-optimal performance. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a Differentiable RAG (D-RAG) approach that jointly optimizes the retriever and the generator for KGQA. Via reformulating the optimization objective as an expectation over a subgraph distribution with respect to answer generation likelihood, D-RAG makes the joint optimization feasible. Specifically, it implements this joint optimization through a differentiable subgraph sampling and prompting module that integrates Gumbel-Softmax reparameterization for sampling and a neural prompt construction process that fuses semantic and structural information. Experimental results on WebQSP and CWQ demonstrate that D-RAG not only outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, but also effectively reduces retrieval noise in the process.