Quantifying Informativeness in Knowledge Graph-Augmented In-Context Learning for Multiple Choice Query Answering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges when attempting to utilize knowledge not encoded during pre-training. In-context learning (ICL) addresses this limitation by embedding relevant information directly into prompts, enabling LLMs to leverage external knowledge without updating their parameters. Recent advances have explored integrating knowledge graph (KG) information into prompts, taking advantage of the structured and factual representations of entities and relationships that KGs provide. A common approach involves identifying key concepts in a task, grounding them to KG nodes, extracting ego-subgraphs centered on these concepts, and incorporating them into prompts. However, not all subgraphs are equally relevant to the task, and selecting appropriate knowledge remains a critical challenge, as irrelevant or noisy subgraphs can reduce model accuracy. This study investigates how KG-based information related to task-specific concepts influences LLM performance on multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks. We implement a four-stage pipeline that (1) identifies key concepts from questions and grounds them in the KG, (2) extracts individual ego-subgraphs for each concept, (3) integrates these subgraphs into prompts, and (4) evaluates their impact on LLM reasoning via probability scoring. Our analysis highlights which concept-specific subgraphs enhance performance, which introduce misleading information, and which have neutral effects. We show that carefully selected KG subgraphs can substantially outperform others in semantic relevance. Furthermore, we examine how the size and connectivity of selected KG subgraphs influence model performance. Overall, this work deepens understanding of KG-based knowledge selection in ICL and informs the design of more effective, targeted prompting strategies. This project's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/maryam-ghanbari/InformativenessOfKGs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".