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ACL Findings2025

RLKGF: Reinforcement Learning from Knowledge Graph Feedback Without Human Annotations

Lian Yan, Chen Tang, Yi Guan, Haotian Wang, Songyuan Wang, Haifeng Liu, Yang Yang, Jingchi Jiang

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been shown to effectively align large language models (LLMs) with human knowledge. However, the lack of human preference labels remains a significant bottleneck when applying RLHF to a downstream domain. Humans in RLHF play a critical role in injecting reasoning preferences into LLM, and we assume the reasoning process underlying human assessments may potentially be replaced by reasoning pathways derived from Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Inspired by this assumption, we propose Reinforcement Learning from Knowledge Graph Feedback (RLKGF), a novel method that leverages KG semantics and structure to derive RL rewards in the absence of manual annotations. Unlike Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF), RLKGF directly integrates human priors encoded in KGs as the reward model, aligning LLM responses with expert knowledge without additional preference labeling or reward model training. RLKGF structures contextrelevant facts into knowledge subgraphs and defines rewards by simulating information flow across semantic and logical connections between question and candidate response entities. Experiments on three public and one private medical dialogue dataset demonstrate that RLKGF significantly outperforms the competitive RLAIF in improving LLM diagnostic accuracy. The code is available at https: //github.com/YanPioneer/RLKGF.

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Cited by top-tier papers1

  1. Graph-Preference Learning: Debiasing Network-Sampled Human Feedback for Target Welfare EstimationGuangrui Fan, DanDan Liu, AZNUL SABRI, Pan LihuICML 2026

Builds on12

  1. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
  2. LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsEdward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu et al.ICLR 2022 · 18,833 citations
  3. Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-FeedbackAman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 4,972 citations
  4. Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-ReflectionAkari Asai, Zeqiu Wu, Yizhong Wang, Avirup Sil et al.ICLR 2024 · 1,798 citations
  5. RRHF: Rank Responses to Align Language Models with Human FeedbackHongyi Yuan, Zheng Yuan, Chuanqi Tan, Wei Wang et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 515 citations

Related papers

  1. Knowledge-Aware Co-Reasoning for Multidisciplinary CollaborationXurui Li, Wanghaijiao, Kaisong Song, Rui Zhu et al.EMNLP 2025
  2. RLTHF: Targeted Human Feedback for LLM AlignmentYifei Xu, Tusher Chakraborty, Emre Kiciman, Bibek Aryal et al.ICML 2025
  3. Iterative Knowledge Graph Refinement and Integration for Medical Question AnsweringHaochen Zou, Yongli WangACL Findings 2026
  4. Explore-on-Graph: Incentivizing Autonomous Exploration of Large Language Models on Knowledge Graphs with Path-refined Reward ModelingShiqi Yan, Yubo Chen, Ruiqi Zhou, Zhengxi Yao et al.ICLR 2026 · 3 citations
  5. RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with AI FeedbackHarrison Lee, Samrat Phatale, Hassan Mansoor, Thomas Mesnard et al.ICML 2024 · 598 citations
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