Graph-Based Retrieval

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Period ending 2026-09-21

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Graph-Based Retrieval.

Period ending 2026-09-14

3 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Graph-Based Retrieval.

Period ending 2026-09-07

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Graph-Based Retrieval.

26 papers

Latest in Graph-Based Retrieval

Sep 14, 2026cs.NE

Complete Suffix Prediction for Recommendation via Latent Retrieval over Process Graphs

Complete suffix prediction is challenging in sequential decision settings, where the same prefix can remain compatible with several plausible suffixes. We propose a graphbased metric-learning framework that reformulates complete suffix prediction as latent retrieval over process graphs. Prefixes and suffixes are represented as directed attributed graphs and encoded by edge-conditioned graph neural networks, allowing event-level activities and transition-level durations to be modelled jointly. Prefix representations are projected into the latent suffix space through a predictor trained with a joint reconstruction and contrastive objective strengthened using process-aware hard negatives. To stabilise the learned retrieval geometry, spectral normalisation, and retrieval robustness, spectral normalisation is applied to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on both encoders and predictor. Experiments on two real-life process datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves the best overall results across nearly all evaluated criteria. It improves semantic suffix accuracy measured by normalized Damerau-Levenshtein distance, yields strong retrieval quality through Recall@1, Recall@5, and MRR@5, and maintains temporal plausibility according to Mean Absolute Error. These results show that graph-based latent retrieval is an effective alternative to sequential suffix prediction for recommendation-oriented process monitoring under structural and KPI-related constraints.
Sarra Madad, Myriam Maumy, Fr{é}d{é}ric Bertrand +1
Sep 9, 2026cs.IR

LiteRAG: Cost-Efficient Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Graph-based retrieval can improve multi-hop question answering, but existing approaches often incur high query-time costs and produce diffuse, oversized contexts that reduce generation efficiency. We present LiteRAG, a graph-based retrieval method that replaces expensive retrieval-time LLM control with query-conditioned algorithmic exploration and reasoning-chain context construction. On DistComp, a benchmark for multi-hop retrieval over distributed-systems papers, LiteRAG attains the highest overall quality among the evaluated methods (0.798) while reducing per-query latency by over 100×\times and cost by over 99% relative to GraphRAG Global and DRIFT. On UltraDomain, it matches LinearRAG on overall quality while using about 14×\times fewer tokens. An ablation study indicates that LiteRAG's query-adaptive thresholding and community-aware hub penalization are the main drivers of its token-efficiency gains.
Daniel Alejandro Coll Tejeda, Pedro García López, Daniel Barcelona-Pons
Sep 7, 2026cs.LG

Streaming Hierarchical Inference with Tabular Foundation Models

Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) have recently demonstrated strong predictive performance through in-context learning, but their deployment in high-throughput data streams remains challenging due to communication overhead and latency. We propose \textit{HINT}, a hierarchical inference framework that combines edge-based retrieval with cloud-based TFM inference. A graph-based approximate nearest neighbor memory maintained over a sliding window provides local predictions and uncertainty estimates, allowing confident samples to be processed locally while uncertain instances are selectively offloaded, together with their retrieved context, to a cloud-hosted TFM. The framework exposes an offloading threshold and a neighborhood retrieval policy that can be varied to balance predictive performance and communication cost. Experiments show \textit{HINT} consistently identifies favorable trade-offs.
Vitor Crista, Afonso Lourenço, Diogo Martinho +1
Aug 30, 2026cs.AI

PAGE-RAG: Provenance-Aware Graph Evidence Promotion for Fixed-Budget Multi-hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multi-hop question answering in retrieval-augmented gener?ation (RAG) often benefits from retrieving beyond the few candidates that will finally be read: narrow retrieval can miss an indispensable hop, while expanded retrieval introduces topical distractors. This challenge is not tied to a particu?lar knowledge-base format. Candidate pools may come from standalone retrievers, standard RAG backends, or graph-based retrieval pipelines. What is needed is a query-aware selection layer that can use relational structure to filter candidates be?fore generation. PAGE-RAG addresses this setting by using a graph as a temporary selection structure, rather than assum?ing a graph-structured knowledge base. It builds a query-local graph over retrieved candidates, records why candidates are connected, and treats each connection as a support hypothe?sis rather than support itself. We identify the resulting failure mode as a connectivity-support gap: connected candidates do not necessarily support the answer. We propose PAGE-RAG, a Provenance-Aware Graph Evidence promotion method that scores candidate paths with relevance, source-tracing meta?data, specificity, hubness, noise, and coherence signals, and applies minimal sufficient selection to promote supporting facts into a compact reader context. PAGE-RAG can serve as a complete retrieval-to-reading pipeline, and the same promo?tion stage can be inserted after existing retrieval or RAG sys?tems without replacing their upstream retrieval logic. Across three multi-hop QA benchmarks under the same final bud?get, PAGE-RAG improves support F1 and answer F1 by 10.4 and 3.3 points on a weighted average over a strong retriever. As a plug-in, PAGE-RAG further improves all reported RAG backends, including reasoning-oriented, compression-based, graph-based, and document/chunk-level systems.
Haokun Deng, Xunkai Li, Hongchao Qin +1
Aug 13, 2026cs.CL

EviReform: Evidence-Guided Query Reformulation for Multi-Hop Graph Retrieval

Multi-hop retrieval must recover passages that provide sufficient evidence together. An initial passage often resolves an entity or relation implicit in the question, making the missing evidence easier to describe only after retrieval begins. Graph retrieval improves access to related evidence through stored corpus structure, but its retrieval signal is commonly derived from the original question. Complementary evidence must then be reached through stored relations even when an observed passage provides a more direct semantic cue. We introduce EviReform, which separates revising the retrieval request from aggregating evidence in the graph. Retrieved source passages formulate residual queries for the unresolved information need. The original and residual retrieval signals are normalized separately, combined, and propagated between propositions that share entities. On 2WikiMultiHopQA, HotpotQA, and MuSiQue, EviReform exceeds the strongest baseline by up to 5.59 Recall@5 points and 4.50 F1 points. These results show that observed evidence can guide graph retrieval toward the part of a supporting chain left underspecified by the original question. Code is available at https://github.com/XrazyMee/EviReform.
Xinlong Xu, Yoshua Y. Li
Aug 10, 2026cs.IR

PreGress: Ranking-Native Pre-training and Prompting for Graph Node Ranking

Node ranking is a fundamental problem in graph information retrieval, measuring the relative importance of nodes and supporting a wide range of applications such as influence analysis, recommendation, and graph-based retrieval augmented generation. However, exact computation of graph-based ranking measures is often computationally prohibitive at scale. Existing GNN-based ranking methods provide scalable approximations, but they are typically tailored to individual ranking criteria and require retraining for each downstream task, which limits their transferability and efficiency. Recent graph pre-training approaches aim to enable knowledge transfer across tasks, yet their learning objectives are largely misaligned with node ranking, resulting in suboptimal adaptability to ranking-oriented applications. To address these limitations, we propose PreGress, the first ranking-native pre-training and prompting framework for supporting a wide range of node ranking tasks. PreGress performs multi-task pre-training using our carefully designed objectives, including degree centrality prediction and attribute reconstruction, to jointly capture structural and attribute information. To support heterogeneous ranking criteria, we design lightweight, task-specific prompt modules that adapt a frozen ranking backbone to downstream tasks without full retraining. Experiments on six public graphs and two real-world query-to-item benchmarks---Yelp2018 and MovieLens-100K---together with a controlled five-criterion graph-access study demonstrate strong ranking quality with low task-specific state overhead.
Lujie Ban, Jiasheng shi, Yingli Zhou +5
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

Visualizing Graph-to-Answer Mechanism Recovery in Materials-Science Hypothesis Generation

AI co-scientists can generate fluent materials-science hypotheses, but fluency does not show that an answer preserves a scientifically meaningful mechanism. We present a graph-to-answer mechanism-tracing case study for Graph-PRefLexOR-8B, a Qwen3-8B model adapted to expose distinct stages for brainstorming, graph construction, pattern extraction, and synthesis. We organize semantic backtracking, graph corruption, activation-based recovery measurements, and layer-by-token-region grids into a visual diagnostic workflow for inspecting this pathway. Across 100 open-ended materials-science questions, final answers remain closest to the model's own structured stages, especially synthesis. Under graph corruption, a full sweep over 37 residual-stream checkpoints, the embedding output and 36 transformer blocks, shows little mechanism recovery in the earlier transition region at layers 7--10, recovery instead concentrates in late synthesis and answer-start regions around layers 30 and 36. The workflow is intended to help scientists and model developers identify where a generated hypothesis loses or regains mechanism support before it is passed to downstream experimental planning.
Shashwat Sourav, Subhadeep Pal, Markus J. Buehler +4
Aug 1, 2026cs.AI

CADIR: A Cross-Backend Editable Intermediate Representation for Agentic CAD Generation

Large language models have made it possible to generate executable computer-aided design (CAD) programs from natural-language descriptions or images. However, existing methods represent modeling processes as backend-specific sequential scripts with implicit dependencies or as static geometry, making it difficult to simultaneously preserve construction history, stable topological references, and feature-level editability across different CAD systems. We present CADIR, an agent-friendly executable intermediate representation for CAD generation and cross-backend editing. Built on the OCCT geometry kernel via OCP, CADIR provides explicit, compositional modeling operations and fine-grained execution diagnostics. During program execution, CADIR records modeling operations, parameter dependencies, constraints, and topology selections in a construction graph. To enable reliable cross-backend reconstruction, we introduce Geometric Signature Matching, which identifies corresponding edges and faces despite parameter changes and backend differences, allowing adapters to reconstruct native editable feature histories in FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and Fusion 360. Building on this representation, we further propose a construction-graph retrieval method for text and image queries that supports both full-graph and subgraph retrieval, enabling agents to leverage complete models and modeling substructures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CADIR achieves higher geometric fidelity and execution reliability than existing CAD representations, that construction-graph retrieval further improves model generation quality, and that cross-backend editing enables reliable model reconstruction and post-reconstruction editing across multiple CAD environments.
Yu Liu, Jingzhe Ni, Yiming Chen +4
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

When Does Explicit View Routing Work? A Controlled Study of Multi-View Graph-Text Alignment

Graph-text retrieval typically maps a graph and its description to a single embedding, even when a query concerns only one semantic aspect, such as a class label or molecular property. Multiple heads can separate these aspects, but a change in the query head may alter retrieval even when the wrong text is sent to that head. Such behavior demonstrates architectural channelization, not necessarily semantic routing. We examine the conditions under which this distinction can be resolved. Our controlled version of MV-GTA uses deterministic, verifiable text segments; isolated text encoders; view-specific graph heads; and relevance derived from external labels or RDKit descriptors. Correct routing and per-sample derangements form a causal test of whether retrieval depends on content. On BBBP and BACE, correct routing improves label and property nDCG by 0.305 to 0.685 over deranged training. The expected graph head exceeds the best wrong head by 0.303 to 0.453. Topology does not specialize consistently across the two datasets. In a matched three-seed comparison, one joint model obtains mean topology, label, and property nDCG of 0.720/1.000/0.877; three separately trained Single specialists obtain 0.633/0.976/0.859. Property paraphrase augmentation also improves unseen-template nDCG by 0.140 and 0.147 over a matched-exposure canonical control. Consistency and hard-template extensions, however, reduce canonical retrieval in some settings. The evidence is therefore limited to explicit, externally grounded label and property routing and observed multi-interface consolidation. It does not establish free-form routing, consistent three-view specialization, statistical equivalence to specialists, or superior downstream prediction.
Xiao Yue, Guangzhi Qu
Jul 22, 2026cs.CL

Lightweight Person-Place Relation Extraction from Historical Newspapers with Dependency Graphs and Proximity Features

The HIPE-2026 shared task introduces person-place relation extraction from multilingual historical newspapers as a new evaluation track, classifying the at and isAt relations between pre-annotated person and location mentions in English, French, and German. Motivated by the cost of processing historical archives at scale, our team (DS@GT HIPE, team 2 in the official results) investigates how far a lightweight, interpretable system can go without any pretrained language model at the relation classification stage. Our approach builds a document-level graph from dependency parses, extracts proximity-based and part-of-speech features for each entity pair, and classifies them with small scikit-learn ensembles or compact Graph Attention Networks, keeping every submitted run under 847K parameters. On the official evaluation (Test A, the newspaper test set), our best run reached a macro recall of 0.5142, ranking 3rd on the Efficiency profile while placing mid-table on Accuracy among the 17 participating teams. Two findings stand out. First, minimum character distance alone captures most of the classification signal; adding further engineered features yields inconsistent gains and sometimes degrades performance, echoing prior evidence that argument distance dominates relation extraction. Second, document-grouped cross-validation is essential on this corpus: pair-level splits inflate scores by 25-37 percentage points because entity mentions recur across documents, a data-leakage effect that grouped cross-validation removes.
Mlen-Too Wesley
Jul 20, 2026cs.IR

Aethel: A Reproducible Graph-Retrieval Framework for Multi-Hop Financial Diligence

Secondary private equity transactions require rapid synthesis of fragmented, unstructured financial disclosures, where critical metrics and their entity anchors are distributed across disjoint documents with limited lexical overlap. We present Aethel, a reproducible framework that combines bipartite Personalized PageRank graph retrieval with a coreference-aware Bipartite Coreference Teleportation layer and an orchestrated specialist-agent architecture. Aethel models corpora as entity-passage graphs and propagates relevance through explicit relational paths to support multi-hop financial diligence. We evaluate the retrieval layer on 200-question samples from the MuSiQue and 2WikiMultiHopQA validation sets, comparing sparse lexical, dense bi-encoder, vanilla graph, and coreference-aware graph retrieval. Aethel achieves HR@5 of 100.0% on 2WikiMultiHopQA and 88.5% on MuSiQue, improving coverage over vanilla graph retrieval while trading off top-rank precision. We also evaluate retrieval over a 4,123-chunk corpus of financial disclosures and find that graph retrieval outperforms dense retrieval on multi-hop recall but does not surpass a strong BM25 baseline at open-corpus scale. The results show that graph-based retrieval offers interpretable multi-hop evidence paths and degrades more gracefully than dense retrieval as corpus size grows, while also demonstrating that its advantage depends strongly on corpus scale and entity-index quality. Code and evaluation artifacts are released for reproducibility.
Krish Sapru
Jun 19, 2026cs.IR

LEDGER: Scaling Agentic Document Editing with Dependency-aware Graph Retrieval

We introduce LEDGER to tackle the novel context engineering challenge of agentic document editing, where localized edits to long, structured documents must be applied efficiently without breaking cross-references or semantic consistency. LEDGER constructs a lightweight dependency graph that explicitly models document structure, including hierarchical organization, explicit references, implicit dependencies, and semantic relationships. For each edit, graph-guided retrieval selects only the necessary context, avoiding full-document processing while preserving consistency. We evaluate LEDGER on a curated benchmark of 1.9k test cases with various document types and lengths, spanning six state-of-the-art models: LEDGER improves consistency from 56% to 76% across all six models and test scenarios while reducing token usage. Notably, LEDGER with low reasoning effort matches baseline performance at high reasoning effort using fewer tokens, showing that explicit dependency representations can partially substitute for expensive internal reasoning in agentic document editing.
Mike Hang Wang, Utkarsh Garg, Reza Davari +5
Jun 16, 2026stat.ML

Compact Geometric Representations of Hierarchies

Computing geometric representations of data is a cornerstone of modern machine learning, typically achieved by training dual encoders which map queries and documents into a shared embedding space. Recent work of You et al. [NeurIPS '25] has extended this approach to hierarchical retrieval, where relevance is determined by the ancestor-descendant relationships in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). While previous work has shown that valid embeddings exist when the number of descendants is small, these bounds degrade significantly for deep hierarchies, requiring dimensions as large as the total number of nodes. In this paper, we investigate compact reachability embeddings for more general graph classes and provide theoretical guarantees for representing hierarchies using embeddings whose dimension depends on structural graph parameters. We prove that for any directed tree, there exists a reachability embedding in constant dimension 3, independent of the tree's size or depth. We generalize this result to graphs characterized by treewidth tt, constructing embeddings of dimension O(tlogn)O(t \log n), where nn is the number of nodes. Complementing these upper bounds, we provide matching or near-matching lower bounds, showing that dimension Ω(n)Ω(n) is necessary for general DAGs and Ω(t/log(n/t))Ω(t/\log(n/t)) is required for graphs of treewidth tt. We also obtain upper and lower bounds parameterized by the number of cross-edges in the DAG. We additionally show that our embeddings can be constructed on real world datasets, and that they give much smaller dimensions in high recall regimes compared to prior embeddings with theoretical guarantees.
Prashant Gokhale, Piotr Indyk, Yuhao Liu +3
Jun 16, 2026cs.IR

RankGraph-2: Lifecycle Co-Design for Billion-Node Graph Learning in Recommendation

Graph-based retrieval at billion-node scale requires jointly solving three tightly coupled problems -- graph construction, representation learning, and real-time serving -- yet existing work addresses each in isolation. We present RankGraph-2, a framework deployed at Meta that co-designs all three lifecycle stages for similarity-based retrieval (U2U2I and U2I2I), where each stage's requirements shape the others. Serving requires a co-learned cluster index to avoid expensive online KNN -- this pushes index co-training into the training objective. Training benefits from the observation that similarity-based retrieval tolerates pre-computed neighborhoods, eliminating online graph infrastructure -- this requires construction to produce self-contained data. Construction must also support hour-level refresh for item coverage. Acting on these cascading requirements, RankGraph-2 reduces hundreds of trillions of edges to hundreds of billions via subsampling with popularity bias correction, pre-computes multi-hop neighborhoods via personalized PageRank, and co-learns a residual-quantization cluster index that reduces serving computational cost by 83%. This lifecycle co-design enables a simple architecture to achieve 3.8 x higher recall than a GAT + Deep Graph Infomax model on a bipartite graph and 2.1 x higher than PyTorch-BigGraph on item retrieval. RankGraph-2 delivers up to +0.96% CTR and +2.75% CVR, and has powered 20+ retrieval launches across major surfaces.
Renzhi Wu, Zikun Cui, Junjie Yang +10
Jun 15, 2026cs.RO

VL-MemKnG: Hybrid Memory with a Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graph for Question Answering over Long Egocentric Navigation Trajectories

Answering navigation-relevant questions over long egocentric videos requires retrieving and organizing evidence distributed across distant temporal moments while maintaining spatial and contextual consistency. Although long-context vision--language models can achieve strong answer quality, they are computationally expensive for long trajectories and inefficient for repeated querying. Recent graph-based approaches such as VL-KnG address this challenge through persistent spatio-temporal knowledge graphs, but graph-centric retrieval alone may underrepresent broader temporal continuity and contextual cues. We present VL-MemKnG, a hybrid memory framework that extends VL-KnG by combining a spatio-temporal knowledge graph with persistent segment-level contextual memory. The knowledge graph captures structured relational information and long-range object associations, while segment-level memory preserves broader temporal context for long-horizon evidence retrieval. A hybrid retrieval-and-reasoning module jointly operates over both memory representations to produce evidence-grounded answers and temporally organized supporting evidence. We also introduce WalkieKnowledgeT+, an extension of WalkieKnowledge for long-horizon navigation-oriented video question answering. The benchmark includes temporally distributed reasoning tasks requiring evidence aggregation across multiple non-cooccurring moments. On WalkieKnowledgeT+, VL-MemKnG improves Top-1 retrieval accuracy from 58% to 67% and Recall@1 from 34.50% to 40.55%, outperforming all compared methods, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Qwen 3.5+. The gains are particularly pronounced on temporal-global and temporally scattered aggregation questions, demonstrating the benefits of combining structured relational memory with segment-level contextual memory while maintaining efficient query-time inference.
Svetlana Lukina, Mohamad Al Mdfaa, Gloria Haro +2
Jun 10, 2026cs.CL

An Ontology-Guided Multi-Anchor Graph Retrieval Framework for Traffic Legal Liability Determination

Traffic law liability determination is critical for assigning legal penalties, requiring the simultaneous identification of interdependent statutory provisions across multiple legal dimensions. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation methods suffer from a multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck: single axis architectures compress complex legal queries into a single pathway, causing interdependent statutory dimensions to be overlooked. To address this, we propose OMAGR, an ontology-guided framework that decomposes queries into ontology-aligned anchors and executes parallel graph retrieval across each dimension, ensuring independent retrieval across dimensions before fusion. To evaluate the proposed method, we created the TrafficLaw-QA dataset, an expert-validated benchmark dataset containing 200 questions and 527 legal provisions. Results show that TrafficOmni-RAG outperforms baselines on Context Precision and Faithfulness metrics. The findings demonstrate that parallel multi-anchor retrieval effectively resolves the multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck, offering a promising direction for traffic law liability determination research.
Xu Li, Shuqi Tian, Xun Han +2
Jun 4, 2026cs.IR

Bridging the Semantic-Collaborative Gap: An Asymmetric Graph Architecture for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

Collaborative filtering and graph-based recommendation models are highly effective because they leverage observed user interactions, but this dependence creates a fundamental cold-start challenge when newly added content has no interaction history. In Tubi's production retrieval system, this challenge is further constrained by the serving interface: new content must be assigned a standalone embedding immediately, and the model must also produce device embeddings suitable for approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval. We address this setting by formulating cold-start recommendation as an inductive graph-completion problem on a temporal bipartite device-content graph. We propose Shallow-RHS, an asymmetric link-prediction architecture in which the left-hand side (LHS) device tower leverages temporally valid watch-history message passing to capture collaborative signals, while the right-hand side (RHS) content tower is intentionally shallow with respect to the graph and encodes content solely from intrinsic features. The RHS tower does not use ID-based embeddings, content-side subgraphs, neighbor aggregation, or interaction-derived representations, forcing the content encoder to map intrinsic features into a collaborative-filtering-aware embedding space. After training, the learned content encoder generates embeddings for both warm and newly ingested content, enabling implicit graph completion through retrieval of warm surrogate neighbors. We further extend the same representation-completion principle to device cold-start by constructing cohort-based embeddings from demographic features. Large-scale online experiments demonstrate consistent relative improvements in content cold-start engagement, promotion speed, impression acquisition, and device cold-start engagement.
Anh Truong, John Trenkle, Yuanbo Chen +4
May 28, 2026cs.IR

GRASP: Plan-Guided Graph Retrieval with Adaptive Fusion and Reranking on Semi-Structured Knowledge Bases

Semi-structured knowledge bases (SKBs) embed textual documents in a typed graph of entities and relations, and underpin applications such as product search, academic paper search, and precision-medicine inquiries. Existing hybrid retrieval systems on SKBs either use the graph only for query expansion, mix textual and structural branches under a global weighting, or rely on fine-tuned graph-traversal generators. We present GRASP, a three-stage SKB retrieval framework unifying plan-based graph retrieval, plan-conditioned fusion with a dense retriever, and a fine-tuned reranker over the fused candidates. GRASP substantially advances the state of the art on every metric across the three STaRK benchmarks, lifting average Hit@1 from 62.0 to 73.9. Ablation and sensitivity studies further confirm the effectiveness and robustness of GRASP.
Yicheng Tao, Yiqun Wang, Xiangchen Song +3
May 22, 2026cs.LG

SeedER: Seed-and-Expand Retrieval from Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) offer a rich representation for relational knowledge, but their irregular structure makes retrieval challenging: ego-graph expansion grows rapidly, and dense embedding methods struggle with multi-hop compositional queries. Existing agent-based graph exploration approaches, while expressive, are often too expensive for large-scale retrieval. We introduce SeedER (Seed-and-Expand Retrieval), a retrieval framework that explicitly leverages KG structure through iterative, low-cost expansion. SeedER first seeds a compact set of core nodes using lightweight dense and entity-based retrieval, then selectively expands this set via a learned graph-aware policy trained with reinforcement learning. This design decomposes global reasoning into reusable local decisions, enabling efficient discovery of query-relevant nodes while tightly controlling expansion cost. We show theoretical limitations of dense retrieval on compositional graph queries, and establish advantages of SeedER from both compositional generalization and graph-constrained submodular optimization perspectives. Empirically, SeedER substantially improves recall with compact candidate sets over strong dense and graph-augmented baselines, making it an effective first-stage retriever for knowledge-intensive reasoning systems.
Hamed Shirzad, Frederik Wenkel, Dominique Beaini +2
May 8, 2026cs.IR

LARGER: Lexically Anchored Repository Graph Exploration and Retrieval

Repository-level coding agents must first localize the files and symbols relevant to a task; failures at this stage can cascade across downstream objectives ranging from patch generation to test writing and codebase question answering. Existing agents navigate repositories primarily through lexical search, often missing structural relations such as imports, call chains, type hierarchies, and code-test links. Graph-based retrieval can recover such dependencies, but existing approaches often require separate graph tools or traversal stages that fragment the agent's interaction loop. We formalize repository context localization as Lexically Anchored Structural Localization, where success depends on turning lexical matches into high-precision structural entry points and exposing the most useful confidence-filtered local neighborhoods within the agent's existing search loop. We introduce LARGER (Lexically Anchored Repository Graph Exploration and Retrieval), a lexically anchored active-set retrieval framework that starts from lexical matches, aligns them to graph anchors, and performs confidence-filtered local expansion within the agent's existing search loop. LARGER integrates directly into existing CLI coding agents without requiring external graph databases or specialized graph interfaces. Across four benchmarks spanning localization, test generation, and codebase understanding, LARGER improves file-level Acc@5 on LocBench by +13.9 points with tuned hyperparameters and still gains +11.8 points with fixed hyperparameters over the strongest baseline, while delivering consistent gains on MuLocBench, SWE-Atlas Test Writing, and SWE-Atlas Codebase QA.
Yuntong Hu, Tongli Su, Liang Zhao +2
May 7, 2026cs.CL

GATHER: Convergence-Centric Hyper-Entity Retrieval for Zero-Shot Cell-Type Annotation

Zero-shot single-cell cell-type annotation aims to determine a cell's type from a given set of expressed genes without any training. Existing knowledge-graph-based RAG approaches retrieve evidence by expanding from source entities and relying on iterative LLM reasoning. However, in this setting each query contains tens to hundreds of genes, where no single gene is decisive and the label emerges only from their collective co-occurrence. Such hyper-entity queries fundamentally challenge local, entity-wise exploration strategies, which reason from individual genes, leading to poor scalability and substantial LLM cost. We propose GATHER (Graph-Aware Traversal with Hyper-Entity Retrieval), a convergence-centric retriever tailored to hyper-entity queries. It performs global multi-source graph traversal and identifies topological convergence points -- nodes jointly reachable from many input genes. These convergence nodes act as high-information hyper-entities that capture entity synergy. By incorporating node- and path-importance scoring, GATHER selects informative evidence entirely without LLM involvement during retrieval. Instantiated on a self-constructed cell-centric biological knowledge graph (VCKG), GATHER outperforms strong KG-RAG baselines (ToG, ToG-2, RoG, PoG) on two datasets (Immune and Lung), achieving the highest exact-match accuracy (27.45% and 59.64%) with only a single LLM call per sample, compared to 2--61 calls for KG-RAG baselines. Our results demonstrate that convergence nodes compress multi-entity signals into compact, high-information evidence that conveys more per item than multi-hop paths, providing an efficient global alternative to local entity-wise reasoning.
Zhonghui Zhang, Feng Jiang, Shaowei Qin +2
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

STEM: Structure-Tracing Evidence Mining for Knowledge Graphs-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Knowledge Graph-based Question Answering (KGQA) plays a pivotal role in complex reasoning tasks but remains constrained by two persistent challenges: the structural heterogeneity of Knowledge Graphs(KGs) often leads to semantic mismatch during retrieval, while existing reasoning path retrieval methods lack a global structural perspective. To address these issues, we propose Structure-Tracing Evidence Mining (STEM), a novel framework that reframes multi-hop reasoning as a schema-guided graph search task. First, we design a Semantic-to-Structural Projection pipeline that leverages KG structural priors to decompose queries into atomic relational assertions and construct an adaptive query schema graph. Subsequently, we execute globally-aware node anchoring and subgraph retrieval to obtain the final evidence reasoning graph from KG. To more effectively integrate global structural information during the graph construction process, we design a Triple-Dependent GNN (Triple-GNN) to generate a Global Guidance Subgraph (Guidance Graph) that guides the construction. STEM significantly improves both the accuracy and evidence completeness of multi-hop reasoning graph retrieval, and achieves State-of-the-Art performance on multiple multi-hop benchmarks.
Peng Yu, En Xu, Bin Chen +2
Apr 23, 2026cs.CL

EngramaBench: Evaluating Long-Term Conversational Memory with Structured Graph Retrieval

Large language model assistants are increasingly expected to retain and reason over information accumulated across many sessions. We introduce EngramaBench, a benchmark for long-term conversational memory built around five personas, one hundred multi-session conversations, and one hundred fifty queries spanning factual recall, cross-space integration, temporal reasoning, adversarial abstention, and emergent synthesis. We evaluate Engrama, a graph-structured memory system, against GPT-4o full-context prompting and Mem0, an open-source vector-retrieval memory system. All three use the same answering model (GPT-4o), isolating the effect of memory architecture. GPT-4o full-context achieves the highest composite score (0.6186), while Engrama scores 0.5367 globally but is the only system to score higher than full-context prompting on cross-space reasoning (0.6532 vs. 0.6291, n=30). Mem0 is cheapest but substantially weaker (0.4809). Ablations reveal that the components driving Engrama's cross-space advantage trade off against global composite score, exposing a systems-level tension between structured memory specialization and aggregate optimization.
Julian Acuna
Apr 21, 2026cs.IR

Query-Aware Flow Diffusion for Graph-Based RAG with Retrieval Guarantees

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems leverage interconnected knowledge structures to capture complex relationships that flat retrieval struggles with, enabling multi-hop reasoning. Yet most existing graph-based methods suffer from (i) heuristic designs lacking theoretical guarantees for subgraph quality or relevance and/or (ii) the use of static exploration strategies that ignore the query's holistic meaning, retrieving neighborhoods or communities regardless of intent. We propose Query-Aware Flow Diffusion RAG (QAFD-RAG), a training-free framework that dynamically adapts graph traversal to each query's holistic semantics. The central innovation is query-aware traversal: during graph exploration, edges are dynamically weighted by how well their endpoints align with the query's embedding, guiding flow along semantically relevant paths while avoiding structurally connected but irrelevant regions. These query-specific reasoning subgraphs enable the first statistical guarantees for query-aware graph retrieval, showing that QAFD-RAG recovers relevant subgraphs with high probability under mild signal-to-noise conditions. The algorithm converges exponentially fast, with complexity scaling with the retrieved subgraph size rather than the full graph. Experiments on question answering and text-to-SQL tasks demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art graph-based RAG methods.
Zhuoping Zhou, Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh, Sima Didari +7
Mar 6, 2026cs.DB

Efficient K-generalizable Learned Search

Learned top-K search improves the accuracy-latency trade-off of graph-based vector search, but existing methods are designed for a fixed K: serving production workloads with varying K values requires preprocessing cost proportional to the number of distinct Ks served - prohibitive in practice. This paper shows that learned search can support arbitrary K with the preprocessing cost of a single top-1 model. The key idea is to reduce top-K learned search to repeated masked top-1 refinement, which works because the distance-reduction trajectory for discovering the next top-1 vector is largely invariant to the number of results already found. We therefore train the model on trajectory features that remain effective under masking. To make repeated refinement robust and efficient, OMEGA counters error accumulation across iterations with rank-wise confidence allocation, and skips unnecessary model invocations with a statistical forecast of recall from partial results. Across nine dataset-scale configurations, OMEGA meets the 0.95 recall target with one K-independent model. Under the lowest-preprocessing configuration of each learned baseline,it reduces mean latency by 7-36% versus DARTH, 3-25% versus MultiK-DARTH, and 8-21% versus LAET on BIGANN, BIGANN-1B, DEEP, and three production workloads. On GIST, Text2Image, and MS MARCO, its latency remains within 9% of DARTH and MultiK-DARTH. On production traces, OMEGA further reduces total serving and preprocessing computation by up to 28%.
Yifan Peng, Jiafei Fan, Xingda Wei +7
Dec 18, 2025cs.SE

SpIDER: Spatially Informed Dense Embedding Retrieval for Software Issue Localization

Retrieving code functions, classes or files relevant to a user query, bug report or feature request from large codebases is a fundamental challenge for Large Language Model (LLM)-based coding agents. Agentic approaches typically employ sparse methods like BM25 or dense embedding strategies to identify semantically relevant units. While dense embedding approaches can outperform BM25 by large margins, both ignore the graph-structured characteristics of the codebase. To address this, we propose SpIDER (Spatially Informed Dense Embedding Retrieval), a dense retrieval approach that integrates LLM-based reasoning with graph-based exploration of the codebase. We further introduce SpIDER-Bench, a graph-structured benchmark curated from SWEPolyBench, SWEBench-Verified and Multi-SWE-bench, spanning Python, Java, JavaScript and TypeScript repositories. SpIDER's graph-based candidate expansion attaches a structural reason for inclusion to each surfaced function (its seed and the edge type linking them), making the candidate set auditable while keeping the retrieval budget fixed. The graph is built from per-repository syntax trees, so it can be constructed on-demand at the start of a developer session rather than precomputed offline. Empirical results show that SpIDER consistently improves dense retrieval Recall@20 across every language and benchmark in SpIDER-Bench: by at least 13% relative (+0.05 to +0.12 absolute) along containment edges, rising to at least 27% relative (+0.11 to +0.19 absolute) once call edges are explored.
Shravan Chaudhari, Rahul Thomas Jacob, Jiajun Cao +3