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Knowledge Graph Based Agent for Complex, Knowledge-Intensive QA in Medicine (arxiv.org)
3 points by rntn on Oct 14, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The system has a language model propose simple subject-relation-object facts for a medical question, then checks each one against a trusted biomedical knowledge graph and drops the wrong ones before answering. It beat standard retrieval-based answering, raising accuracy by over 5.2% across 15 models.

Abstract · KGARevion: An AI Agent for Knowledge-Intensive Biomedical QA

Biomedical reasoning integrates structured, codified knowledge with tacit, experience-driven insights. Depending on the context, quantity, and nature of available evidence, researchers and clinicians use diverse strategies, including rule-based, prototype-based, and case-based reasoning. Effective medical AI models must handle this complexity while ensuring reliability and adaptability. We introduce KGARevion, a knowledge graph-based agent that answers knowledge-intensive questions. Upon receiving a query, KGARevion generates relevant triplets by leveraging the latent knowledge embedded in a large language model. It then verifies these triplets against a grounded knowledge graph, filtering out errors and retaining only accurate, contextually relevant information for the final answer. This multi-step process strengthens reasoning, adapts to different models of medical inference, and outperforms retrieval-augmented generation-based approaches that lack effective verification mechanisms. Evaluations on medical QA benchmarks show that KGARevion improves accuracy by over 5.2% over 15 models in handling complex medical queries. To further assess its effectiveness, we curated three new medical QA datasets with varying levels of semantic complexity, where KGARevion improved accuracy by 10.4%. The agent integrates with different LLMs and biomedical knowledge graphs for broad applicability across knowledge-intensive tasks. We evaluated KGARevion on AfriMed-QA, a newly introduced dataset focused on African healthcare, demonstrating its strong zero-shot generalization to underrepresented medical contexts.

Xiaorui Su, Yibo Wang, Shanghua Gao, Xiaolong Liu, Valentina Giunchiglia, Djork-Arné Clevert, Marinka Zitnik
arXiv:2410.04660 · cs.AI · submitted Oct 7, 2024 · updated Mar 3, 2025
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