EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ben Liu 0002
dblp:07/3517-2
· DBLP profile ↗
5ranked-venue papers in the field
2as first author
5since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-5031-9368ORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Information Retrieval & Web Search · 5 (2 first)
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Plan Then Retrieve: Reinforcement Learning-Guided Complex Reasoning over Knowledge GraphsabstractKnowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions by reasoning over structured knowledge graphs (KGs). While large language models (LLMs) have advanced KGQA through their strong reasoning capabilities, existing methods continue to struggle to fully exploit both the rich knowledge encoded in KGs and the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, particularly in complex scenarios. They often assume complete KG coverage and lack mechanisms to judge when external information is needed, and their reasoning remains locally myopic, failing to maintain coherent multi-step planning, leading to reasoning failures even when relevant knowledge exists. We propose Graph-RFT, a novel two-stage reinforcement fine-tuning KGQA framework with a ''plan–KGsearch–and–Websearch–during–think'' paradigm, that enables LLMs to perform autonomous planning and adaptive retrieval scheduling across KG and web sources under incomplete knowledge conditions. Graph-RFT introduces a chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning method with a customized plan–retrieval dataset activates structured reasoning and resolves the GRPO cold-start problem. It then introduces a novel plan–retrieval guided reinforcement learning process integrates explicit planning and retrieval actions with a multi-reward design, enabling coverage-aware retrieval scheduling. It employs a Cartesian-inspired planning module to decompose complex questions into ordered sub-questions, and logical expression to guide tool invocation for globally consistent multi-step reasoning. This reasoning–retrieval process is optimized with a multi-reward combining outcome and retrieval-specific signals, enabling the model to learn when and how to combine KG and web retrieval effectively. Experiments on multiple KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that Graph-RFT achieves superior performance over strong baselines, even with smaller LLM backbones, and substantially improves complex question decomposition, factual coverage, and tool coordination. Yanlin Song, Ben Liu 0002, Víctor Gutiérrez-Basulto, Zhiwei Hu, Qianqian Xie, Min Peng 0002, Sophia Ananiadou, Jeff Z. Pan |
WWW | 2 |
| 2025 | Boosting Pre-trained Language Models for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning via Joint Structure and Recurring Patterns
Zihao Jiang 0009, Miao Peng, Ben Liu 0002, Min Peng 0002 |
WISE (2) | 4 |
| 2025 | SymAgent: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Learning Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge GraphsabstractRecent advancements have highlighted that Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations when solving complex reasoning problems, leading to erroneous results. To tackle this issue, researchers incorporate Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs. However, existing methods face two limitations: 1) they typically assume that all answers to the questions are contained in KGs, neglecting the incompleteness issue of KGs, and 2) they treat the KG as a static repository and overlook the implicit logical reasoning structures inherent in KGs. In this paper, we introduce SymAgent, an innovative neural-symbolic agent framework that achieves collaborative augmentation between KGs and LLMs. We conceptualize KGs as dynamic environments and transform complex reasoning tasks into a multi-step interactive process, enabling KGs to participate deeply in the reasoning process. SymAgent consists of two modules: Agent-Planner and Agent-Executor. The Agent-Planner leverages LLM's inductive reasoning capability to extract symbolic rules from KGs, guiding efficient question decomposition. The Agent-Executor autonomously invokes predefined action tools to integrate information from KGs and external documents, addressing the issues of KG incompleteness. Furthermore, we design a self-learning framework comprising online exploration and offline iterative policy updating phases, enabling the agent to automatically synthesize reasoning trajectories and improve performance. Experimental results demonstrate that SymAgent with weak LLM backbones (i.e., 7B series) yields better or comparable performance compared to various strong baselines. Further analysis reveals that our agent can identify missing triples, facilitating automatic KG updates. Ben Liu 0002, Jihai Zhang 0001, Fangquan Lin, Cheng Yang 0008, Min Peng 0002, Wotao Yin |
WWW | 1 |
| 2025 | Historical facts learning from Long-Short Terms with Language Model for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Ben Liu 0002, Miao Peng, Zihao Jiang 0009, Lei Liu 0072, Min Peng 0002 |
Inf. Process. Manag. | 2 |
| 2024 | UniLP: Unified Topology-aware Generative Framework for Link Prediction in Knowledge GraphabstractLink prediction (LP) in knowledge graph (KG) is a crucial task that has received increasing attention recently. Due to the heterogeneous structures of KGs, various application scenarios, and demand-specific downstream objectives, there exist multiple subtasks in LP. Most studies only focus on designing a dedicated architecture for a specific subtask, which results in various complicated LP models. The isolated architectures and chaotic situations make it significant to construct a unified model that can handle multiple LP subtasks simultaneously. However, unifying all subtasks in LP presents numerous challenges, including unified input forms, task-specific context modeling, and topological information encoding. To address these challenges, we propose a topology-aware generative framework, namely UniLP, which utilizes a generative pre-trained language model to accomplish different LP subtasks universally. Specifically, we introduce a context demonstration template to convert task-specific context into a unified generative formulation. Based on the unified formulation, to address the limitation of transformer architecture that may overlook important structural signals in KGs, we design novel topology-aware soft prompts to deeply couple topology and text information in a contextualized manner. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our framework achieves substantial performance gain and provides a real unified end-to-end solution for the whole LP subtasks. We also perform comprehensive ablation studies to support in-depth analysis of each component in UniLP. Ben Liu 0002, Miao Peng, Min Peng 0002 |
WWW | 1 |