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The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

2025/10/07 by Xinyu Guo, Guo, Xinyu, Zhengliang Shi +6
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Topic Modeling

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.06198

openalex publication_date 2025/10/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

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