Dependency Matters: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Explicit Knowledge Grounding

Xiangyu Wen, Min Li, Junhua Huang, Jianyuan Zhong, Zhijian Xu, Zeju Li, Yongxiang Huang, Mingxuan Yuan, Qiang Xu

Keywords: LLM Reasoning, Question Answering, Knowledge-enhanced Reasoning, Dependency-aware Reasoning

TL;DR: We propose GRiD, a framework that grounds reasoning in knowledge-enhanced dependency graph, ensures logical consistency, and improves reasoning accuracy across various benchmarks.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often produce reasoning steps that are superficially coherent yet internally inconsistent, leading to unreliable outputs. Since such failures typically arise from implicit or poorly-grounded knowledge, we introduce \emph{Grounded Reasoning in Dependency (GRiD)}, a novel dependency-aware reasoning framework that explicitly grounds reasoning steps in structured knowledge. GRiD represents reasoning as a graph consisting of interconnected knowledge extraction nodes and reasoning nodes, enforcing logical consistency through explicit dependencies. Each reasoning step is validated via a lightweight, step-wise verifier that ensures logical correctness relative to its premises. Extensive experiments across diverse reasoning benchmarks—including StrategyQA, CommonsenseQA, GPQA, and TruthfulQA—demonstrate that GRiD substantially improves reasoning accuracy, consistency, and faithfulness compared to recent state-of-the-art structured reasoning methods. Notably, GRiD enhances performance even when applied purely as a lightweight verification module at inference time, underscoring its generalizability and practical utility. Code is available at: https://github.com/cure-lab/GRiD.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 12159