Co-Evolving Graph and Text Memory for Training-Free Multi-Hop Question Answering

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has empowered Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle knowledge-intensive tasks. However, navigating global, heterogeneous knowledge bases (large-scale knowledge graphs and text corpora) for complex reasoning remains a challenge. Existing methods typically employ reactive, graph-driven exploration strategies, which blindly follow graph topology without adapting to the question context or evolving exploration progress, and lack deep bidirectional synergy between graph and text. To address these limitations, we propose CoG (Cognition on Graph), a cognitive-inspired, training-free framework for adaptive knowledge exploration. Drawing inspiration from human problem-solving, CoG performs a continuous plan-explore-reflect cycle, where it proactively formulates investigation plans, performs dual-source retrieval, and dynamically reflects on progress to adjust strategies. Crucially, it establishes deep bidirectional synergy between structured graph and unstructured text, where entities extracted from text dynamically guide graph exploration to bridge knowledge gaps. Extensive experiments on seven multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that CoG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods while achieving superior exploration efficiency. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/zhougengxian/CoG.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding the generation process on external knowledge. However, standard RAG approaches struggle with multi-hop reasoning. While recent graph-based RAG methods improve the retrieval of interconnected chunks, they often rely on computationally expensive and error-prone LLM-based extraction pipelines. To address these issues, we propose TIGRAG (Token-Induced GraphRAG), an efficient graph-augmented RAG framework based on a token co-occurrence Knowledge Graph. TIGRAG directly models topological relationships between tokens using sliding-window co-occurrence statistics, thus enabling scalable graph construction. During inference, it combines graph-based semantic expansion and neural reranking to retrieve interconnected evidence for multi-hop reasoning. Specifically, it introduces an iterative entity-driven retrieval strategy that progressively expands the query using bridging entities extracted from previously retrieved contexts. We evaluated TIGRAG on three widely adopted multi-hop Question Answering (QA) benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrated that our framework consistently outperforms dense retrieval and graph-based RAG methods in both retrieval and downstream QA tasks, while substantially reducing indexing time, inference latency, and prompt footprint.

Retrieval-augmented generation built on knowledge graphs (Graph RAG) outperforms flat passage retrieval on multi-hop question answering by leveraging graph structure. In most existing systems, however, the question only sets the seed nodes; the subsequent traversal becomes "query-blind", depending solely on the graph structure. The exception is QAFD-RAG, which implements query-aware traversal via a flow-diffusion solver with combined edge re-weighting. This architecture requires loading the full graph into Python memory and an iterative solver with a variable number of iterations complicating integration with the graph database. We propose a spreading-activation method that achieves the same query-aware traversal with a single per-step semantic gate: the step weight is the cosine similarity between the candidate entity's description and the question, and the number of iterations is fixed. The whole retrieval procedure - seed mapping, propagation, top-K selection and context assembly - is expressed as a single Cypher query executed in one round-trip to Neo4j; the graph never leaves the database. On MuSiQue our method matches QAFD-RAG by exact match (32.80 vs 33.50) and outperforms the strongest purely-structural baseline in our comparison, HippoRAG, by 5.3 EM and 3.4 F1; on 2WikiMultiHopQA HippoRAG and QAFD-RAG retain an advantage due to their phrase-node architectures. An ablation with the gate disabled confirms that the gate is the source of a simultaneous F1 gain of 3.6 to 7.4 points and a retrieval-latency reduction by a factor of 1.5 to 4.9.