Beyond Vector Similarity: A Structural Analysis of Graph-Augmented Retrieval for Industrial Knowledge Graphs

While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective at giving LLMs access to external knowledge, mainstream dense-retrieval implementations remain inherently limited in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Graph-based methods address this by constructing knowledge graphs offline, but they often fragment semantics, incur high maintenance, and complicate incremental updates. We propose SAG (SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation), a structured retrieval architecture that organizes documents into an event-entity index without building a global knowledge graph. SAG represents each chunk as a semantically complete event paired with its entities, forming a latent hyperedge that preserves n-ary relations without decomposing them into triples. At query time, SAG treats shared entities as join keys to connect related chunks. This dynamically yields a query-scoped neighborhood of events, and yet every piece of evidence remains the original chunk throughout. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue show that SAG achieves the best retrieval and end-to-end QA performance on every benchmark, with gains that widen as reasoning-chain complexity increases. On MuSiQue, where multi-hop evidence chaining is most demanding, SAG reaches 80.36% Recall@5, outperforming the strongest baseline by 11.52 points. This work paves the way for knowledge infrastructure that enables LLM agents to retrieve and reason over continually growing organizational knowledge.

Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) enhances large language models with structured knowledge, yet existing systems construct knowledge graphs in a single extraction pass, producing noisy entities and brittle retrieval. RAGU, an open-source modular GraphRAG engine, addresses this by separating extraction from consolidation: entities and relations pass through two-stage typed extraction, DBSCAN-backed deduplication, LLM summarization, and Leiden community detection. A key insight motivates a compact extractor: the skills an in-pipeline LLM needs - comprehension, extraction, reasoning over context - are language skills that grow only weakly with model size, unlike factual world knowledge. Accordingly, we train Meno-Lite-0.1, a 7B model optimized for language skills, which outperforms Qwen2.5-32B on knowledge-graph construction (+12.5% relative harmonic mean) and matches it on English GraphRAG tasks. On GraphRAG-Bench (Medical), RAGU retrieves the most complete context at every factoid level (evidence recall up to 0.84 vs. $\leq$0.76) and overtakes HippoRAG2 on synthesis tasks; on multi-hop factoid QA, the apparent HippoRAG2 advantage is shown to be largely an answer-format artifact. RAGU is installable via \texttt{pip install graph_ragu}, runs on a single GPU, and is released under MIT. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/RaguTeam/RAGU, and the Meno-Lite-0.1 model can be obtained from https://huggingface.co/bond005/meno-lite-0.1.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning but struggle with knowledge-intensive questions due to limited context and parametric knowledge. However, existing methods that rely on finetuned LLMs or GNN retrievers are limited by dataset-specific tuning and scalability on large or unseen graphs. We propose the LLM-KGFR collaborative framework, where an LLM works with a structured retriever, the Knowledge Graph Foundation Retriever (KGFR). KGFR encodes relations using LLM-generated descriptions and initializes entities based on their roles in the question, enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen KGs. To handle large graphs efficiently, it employs Asymmetric Progressive Propagation (APP)- a stepwise expansion that selectively limits high-degree nodes while retaining informative paths. Through node-, edge-, and path-level interfaces, the LLM iteratively requests candidate answers, supporting facts, and reasoning paths, forming a controllable reasoning loop. Experiments demonstrate that LLM-KGFR achieves strong performance while maintaining scalability and generalization, providing a practical solution for KG-augmented reasoning.