Outcome-Anchored Credit Reallocation for Agentic Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Overview & Synopsis

Agentic knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) requires large language models (LLMs) to solve complex questions through multi-turn interactions with a knowledge graph (KG). Outcome-supervised reinforcement learning derives verifiable outcome rewards from final answers but uniformly assigns each rollout's outcome-level advantage to all policy-generated tokens, creating a trajectory-to-operation mismatch since KG operations within a rollout can have varying effects on the search process and final answer. To address this, we propose Outcome-Anchored Credit Reallocation (OACR), which employs a training-only KG-state outcome model to estimate outcome-reward changes between adjacent KG search states and converts them into operation credit, from which token-wise weights are derived. These multiplicative weights reallocate token-level update magnitudes while preserving the sign of the outcome-level advantage at every generated token. Across three benchmarks, OACR achieves stronger overall performance than existing KGQA methods while using fewer inference-time LLM calls and tokens.