To hop or not, that is the question: Towards effective multi-hop reasoning over knowledge graphs

With the proliferation of large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs), multi-hop knowledge graph reasoning has been a capstone that enables machines to be able to handle intelligent tasks, especially where some explicit reasoning path is appreciated for decision making. To train a KG reasoner, supervised learning-based methods suffer from false-negative issues, i.e., unseen paths during training are not to be found in prediction; in contrast, reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods do not require labeled paths, and can explore to cover many appropriate reasoning paths. In this connection, efforts have been dedicated to investigating several RL formulations for multi-hop KG reasoning. Particularly, current RL-based methods generate rewards at the very end of the reasoning process, due to which short paths of hops less than a given threshold are likely to be overlooked, and the overall performance is impaired. To address the problem, we propose RL-MHR, a revised RL formulation of multi-hop KG reasoning that is characterized by two novel designs-the stop signal and the worth-trying signal. The stop signal instructs the agent of RL to stay at the entity after finding the answer, preventing from hopping further even if the threshold is not reached; meanwhile, the worth-trying signal encourages the agent to try to learn some partial patterns from the paths that fail to lead to the answer. To validate the design of our model RL-MHR, comprehensive experiments are carried out on three benchmark knowledge graphs, and the results and analysis suggest the superiority of RL-MHR over state-of-the-art methods.