KG-Attention: Knowledge Graph-Guided Attention at Test-Time via Bidirectional Information Aggregation

Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a critical role in enhancing LLMs by introducing structured and grounded knowledge into the learning process. However, most existing KG-enhanced approaches rely on parameter-intensive fine-tuning, which risks catastrophic forgetting and degrades the pretrained model's generalization. Moreover, they exhibit limited adaptability to real-time knowledge updates due to their static integration frameworks. To address these issues, we introduce the first test-time KG-augmented framework for LLMs, built around a dedicated knowledge graph-guided attention (KGA) module that enables dynamic knowledge fusion without any parameter updates. The proposed KGA module augments the standard self-attention mechanism with two synergistic pathways: outward and inward aggregation. Specifically, the outward pathway dynamically integrates external knowledge into input representations via input-driven KG fusion. This inward aggregation complements the outward pathway by refining input representations through KG-guided filtering, suppressing task-irrelevant signals and amplifying knowledge-relevant patterns. Importantly, while the outward pathway handles knowledge fusion, the inward path selects the most relevant triples and feeds them back into the fusion process, forming a closed-loop enhancement mechanism. By synergistically combining these two pathways, the proposed method supports real-time knowledge fusion exclusively at test-time, without any parameter modification. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks verify the comparable knowledge fusion performance of KGA.