BEST-KAG: Enhancing Question Answering of Building Engineering Standards with Multimodal Knowledge Graph Modeling and Large Language Model

arXiv cs.AI Papers

Summary

This paper introduces BEST-KAG, a multimodal knowledge-driven framework for question answering on building engineering standards, leveraging a multimodal knowledge graph and graph-retrieval-based generation to improve clause-grounded traceability and outperform multiple LLMs.

arXiv:2608.11244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Construction standards are critical for building safety and sustainability. Existing standard application workflows rely on keyword-based document retrieval and manual cross-clause interpretation, which cannot reliably support multi-clause reasoning, multimodal knowledge utilization, or traceable clause-level evidence linkage. To address these limitations, this study develops a multimodal knowledge-driven framework that supports question answering on standard knowledge named BEST-KAG (Knowledge-Augmented Generation for Building Engineering STandards). The framework introduces 1) a multimodal knowledge graph (MKG) for unified representation of document hierarchy and heterogeneous standard knowledge with various connections, 2) a rule-LLM hybrid knowledge construction pipeline for scalable multimodal knowledge extraction, creating a large MAG with 251 building engineering standards, 171,652 nodes and 310,914 edges, and 3) a graph-retrieval-based knowledge-augmented generation architecture for clause-grounded and traceable question answering. Experiments demonstrate that BEST-KAG consistently outperforms multiple mainstream LLMs in terms of Expert evaluation, and metrics including BLEU, and ROUGE, with the best improvement up to 74.01% compared to the baselines.
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 08/13/26, 03:24 PM

# BEST-KAG: Enhancing Question Answering of Building Engineering Standards with Multimodal Knowledge Graph Modeling and Large Language Model
Source: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11244](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11244)
[View PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.11244)

> Abstract:Construction standards are critical for building safety and sustainability\. Existing standard application workflows rely on keyword\-based document retrieval and manual cross\-clause interpretation, which cannot reliably support multi\-clause reasoning, multimodal knowledge utilization, or traceable clause\-level evidence linkage\. To address these limitations, this study develops a multimodal knowledge\-driven framework that supports question answering on standard knowledge named BEST\-KAG \(Knowledge\-Augmented Generation for Building Engineering STandards\)\. The framework introduces 1\) a multimodal knowledge graph \(MKG\) for unified representation of document hierarchy and heterogeneous standard knowledge with various connections, 2\) a rule\-LLM hybrid knowledge construction pipeline for scalable multimodal knowledge extraction, creating a large MAG with 251 building engineering standards, 171,652 nodes and 310,914 edges, and 3\) a graph\-retrieval\-based knowledge\-augmented generation architecture for clause\-grounded and traceable question answering\. Experiments demonstrate that BEST\-KAG consistently outperforms multiple mainstream LLMs in terms of Expert evaluation, and metrics including BLEU, and ROUGE, with the best improvement up to 74\.01% compared to the baselines\.

## Submission history

From: Jia\-Rui Lin \[[view email](https://arxiv.org/show-email/4b4e144d/2608.11244)\] **\[v1\]**Sun, 2 Aug 2026 10:27:15 UTC \(1,721 KB\)

Similar Articles

KARLA: Knowledge-base Augmented Retrieval for Language Models

arXiv cs.AI

KARLA proposes a method for LLMs to query a knowledge base during generation, enabling factual updates without retraining and improving transparency. Experiments show improved factual grounding in both short and long-form generation.