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TCC-RAG: Temporal Causal Chain-Guided RAG for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Xinxun Zhang, Yuxiang Wang, Shanshan Feng, Jun Zhang, Tieyun Qian, Binhang Yuan, Kai Yin, Xiao Yan, Jiawei Jiang

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First announced by arXiv: 2026-10-30 · Indexed by Pub-AI: 2026-10-30 UTC

preprint

TCC-RAG: Temporal Causal Chain-Guided RAG for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Xinxun Zhang, Yuxiang Wang, Shanshan Feng, Jun Zhang, Tieyun Qian, Binhang Yuan, Kai Yin, Xiao Yan, Jiawei Jiang

First announced by arXiv: 2026-10-30 · Original record ↗

arxiv
2610.38366
Explicit source versions (1)
  • v1 · Date not supplied
  1. Preprint available

    Source date: 2026-10-30 · First detected: 2026-10-30 UTC · Historical baseline

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    • Official evidence ↗ · RSS guid=oai:arXiv.org:2610.38366v1; arxiv:announce_type=new; item pubDate (official metadata)
Abstract · arxiv

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have spurred growing interest in temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA). Most existing methods rely on semantic retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which suffers from fundamental limitations in complex temporal reasoning. On the one hand, semantic-based RAG methods struggle to capture the multi-hop causal knowledge required for complex temporal reasoning. On the other hand, these methods introduce excessive redundant knowledge, trapping LLMs in spurious reasoning chains that potentially result in erroneous answers. To address these problems, we propose a Temporal Causal Chain-guided RAG (TCC-RAG) to retrieve a concise yet sufficient set of causal knowledge to support complex temporal reasoning. Specifically, we reformulate the temporal knowledge graph into a multi-view causal cue graph, with causal cues inducing connections that explicitly encode temporal evolution and causal dynamics. Based on the causal cue graph, we construct a query-specific temporal causal chain to guide the retrieval process, enabling the model to focus on a concise set of causally relevant knowledge. Finally, we introduce a causal evidence filter to refine the retrieved knowledge, ensuring its causal consistency with the underlying temporal logic of the query. Experiments show that TCC-RAG achieves substantial performance gains of 10.72% and 8.40% on two TKGQA benchmarks, and delivers a remarkable 62.97% improvement for multi-step temporal reasoning.

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