Graph-Based Retrieval

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16 papers in the last four weeks, up 78% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 91

May 30, 2026cs.IR

MemGraphRAG: Memory-based Multi-Agent System for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become an essential method for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging external knowledge. Although effective for simple queries, traditional RAG struggles with large-scale, unstructured corpora where information is highly fragmented. Graph-based RAG (GraphRAG) incorporates knowledge graphs to capture structural relationships, enabling more comprehensive retrieval for complex reasoning. However, existing GraphRAG methods rely on isolated, fragment-level extraction for graph construction, lacking a global perspective on the whole corpus. As a result, these methods frequently lead to thematically inconsistent, logically conflicting, and structurally fragmented graphs that degrade retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose MemGraphRAG, a novel framework that introduces a memory-based multi-agent system to ensure high-quality graph construction. Specifically, MemGraphRAG employs a collaborative society of agents supported by shared memory, which provides a unified global context throughout the extraction process. This mechanism allows agents to dynamically resolve logical conflicts and maintain structural connectivity throughout the corpus. Furthermore, we propose a memory-aware hierarchical retrieval algorithm tailored for the constructed graph. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MemGraphRAG outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models with comparable efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/MemGraphRAG.
May 29, 2026cs.CL

MoG: Mixture of Experts for Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation is intensively studied to ground large language models on external evidence. However, retrieving from a unified knowledge base could inevitably introduce irrelevant information that may mislead generation for complex reasoning. Inspired by the conditional computation of mixture of experts (MoE), where a router sparsely selects specialized experts alongside shared ones for each input, we propose \textbf{M}ixture \textbf{o}f experts for \textbf{G}raph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation, i.e., \textbf{MoG}. It organizes knowledge into two core components: (i) diverse, always-accessible hub graphs that encode semantically and structurally central knowledge and provide contextual clues for expert activation, and (ii) sparsely activated expert graphs that contain domain-specific evidence. MoG first accesses hub graphs to identify general evidence and derive contextual clues. Then, a topology-aware router dynamically activates a limited set of expert graphs conditioned on the query, thereby confining retrieval to a focused evidence subspace. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks show that MoG consistently outperforms strong baselines, with over 20% relative improvement on MuSiQue. Our code is available in https://github.com/DEEP-PolyU/MoG.
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.
May 27, 2026cs.AI

DiagramRAG: A Lightweight Framework to Retrieve Scientific Diagram for Figure Generation

Scientific diagrams are essential for communicating complex methodologies in academic papers. A natural way for researchers to specify such diagrams is through rough sketches, where text labels, connectors, and spatial arrangements express early semantic and topological intentions. However, sketches are usually incomplete, making them insufficient for directly producing publication-quality diagrams. Existing sketch-based generation methods mainly reconstruct the sketch itself, while recent text-driven diagram generation frameworks rely on textual semantics and do not fully exploit the topological structure contained in sketches. In this paper, we introduce DiagramRAG, a lightweight retrieval-augmented framework for sketch-based scientific diagram completion. Given a user sketch, DiagramRAG retrieves reference diagrams that are both semantically relevant to the sketch content and topologically compatible with its structure, and uses them to guide downstream diagram generation. To enable efficient structure-aware retrieval, we represent diagrams as knowledge graphs, synthesize sketch variants at different simplification levels, and train an embedding model to align sketches with compatible diagrams in a shared space. The retrieved references further provide content, topology, and visual priors for completing and rendering the final diagram. Experiments show that DiagramRAG achieves F1-scores of 0.848 and 0.802 on DiagramBank and FigureBench, respectively, and improves generation quality with the best VLM-as-a-Judge score of 7.170, while reducing inference latency to 35.48 seconds per sample. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DiagramRAG-A262 and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous-review-a262/DiagramSketch.
May 24, 2026cs.CV

AstroRAG -- A Pagerank-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipeline for Question Answering in Astronomy

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance in natural language processing but often generate factual errors when relying solely on parametric knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these errors by grounding responses in external evidence, yet conventional retrieve-and-dump approaches frequently introduce irrelevant context that degrades answer quality. In this work, we present AstroRAG -- a PageRank-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline adapted for question answering in astronomy. The system performs token-aware chunking and per-instance, ephemeral indexing in Elasticsearch, then executes a two-stage retrieval: (i) Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) to obtain a small, diverse candidate set and (ii) a reader-driven PageRank (PR) re-ranking on a similarity graph to identify a compact, mutually supportive context under a strict token budget. Our design is training-free, privacy-preserving, and reproducible, as each instance is processed through transient indexing to prevent cross-task leakage. We evaluate the pipeline on the AstroQA benchmark for astronomy QA, and demonstrate competitive performance across all difficulty levels. In particular, the RAG-enhanced Mistral-7B achieves \textbf{79.49% accuracy} and \textbf{79.49% F1-score}, nearly doubling the performance of its non-RAG counterpart. These results highlight the effectiveness of disciplined retrieval and refinement in boosting domain-specific reasoning, establishing a robust foundation for extending RAG to other scientific fields.
May 22, 2026cs.LG

SeedER: Seed-Expand-Retrieve for Efficient Knowledge Graph Retrieval

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. Several approaches use LLM agents to explore the KG, analyze candidate nodes, and decide where to explore next. While expressive, these approaches can incur substantial computational and memory costs. On the other hand, we show theoretically that dense embeddings precomputed for graph nodes, even with augmented structure and neighborhood-aware features, can require embedding dimensions comparable to the size of the graph to answer families of knowledge graph queries. This limitation can be overcome with query-adaptive embeddings under certain conditions, and there are graph neural network (GNN) variants that can do so. However, processing the whole graph with a GNN can also incur substantial memory and computational costs, and it requires dense ground-truth labels indicating whether each node answers the query. Straightforward kk-hop selection around anchor nodes can also be problematic: small kk limits the nodes we can see, and even with small kk values such as three and four, the kk-hop subgraph can grow substantially. In this work, we devise a new approach using Graph Transformers and reinforcement learning that is much less demanding in memory and computation, can run on a CPU at inference time as a first-stage retriever, and requires feedback on only a small number of nodes at a time during training. We show that this method is competitive with methods that fine-tune LLMs to retrieve information from KGs. We call our method SeedER (Seed-Expand-Retrieve), and position it primarily as a first-stage retriever that can run with modest computational resources.
May 20, 2026cs.AI

SciAtlas: A Large-Scale Knowledge Graph for Automated Scientific Research

The exponential growth of global academic output has confronted researchers and AI agents with an unprecedented information explosion,'' where fragmented and unstructured knowledge organization impedes deep interdisciplinary integration. Current academic retrieval tools predominantly rely on superficial keyword matching or vector-space semantic retrieval, which lack the topological reasoning capabilities required to navigate complex logical connections. Agentic deep-research-based frameworks are often prone to logical hallucinations and consuming high inference costs. To bridge this gap, in this report, we introduce SciAtlas, a large-scale, multi-disciplinary, heterogeneous academic resource knowledge graph designed as a panoramic scientific evolution network. By integrating over 43M papers from 26 disciplines, and a total of 157M entities and 3B triplets, SciAtlas provides a structured topological cognitive substrate that dismantles disciplinary barriers and furnishes AI agents with a global perspective. Furthermore, we develop a neuro-symbolic retrieval algorithm featuring tri-path collaborative recall and graph reranking, achieving a seamless transition from simple semantic matching to deterministic association discovery. We also present key application directions of SciAtlas, including literature review, automated research trend synthesis, idea positioning, and academic trajectory exploration, to demonstrate that SciAtlas can serve as an effective cognitive map'' to empower the full loop of automated scientific research while significantly reducing reasoning costs. We have released the interfaces for KG retrieval and various downstream tasks in our GitHub repo.
May 19, 2026cs.CL

ContextRAG: Extraction-Free Hierarchical Graph Construction for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Graph-structured retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can improve answer quality on multi-hop questions, but many current systems rely on large language models (LLMs) to extract entities, relations, and summaries during indexing. These calls add token and wall-clock costs that grow with corpus size. We present ContextRAG, a graph RAG system whose graph topology is constructed without LLM-based entity or relation extraction. ContextRAG derives a fuzzy concept graph over chunk embeddings using residual-quantization k-means and Formal Concept Analysis with Lukasiewicz residuated logic. Bridge-like and meet-derived context nodes are induced by soft fuzzy join and meet operations, rather than by LLM-written graph edges. On a 130-task UltraDomain subset, ContextRAG builds its index with 30 LLM calls and 22,073 tokens. In contrast, a local HiRAG reproduction stress test required 870 indexing calls and 3.54M tokens on a 20-task subset before failing during graph construction; linear extrapolation to 130 tasks implies over 23M indexing tokens. ContextRAG obtains 33.6% F1 overall and 36.8% F1 on multi-hop tasks. An activation analysis shows that queries retrieving at least one lattice-derived node in the top five achieve +3.9 percentage points F1 over queries that do not; this association is diagnostic rather than causal.
May 17, 2026cs.CL

Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations

Co-citation structure is widely assumed to provide stable retrieval signal in legal information systems. We test this assumption longitudinally by constructing UA-StatuteRetrieval, a benchmark that measures co-citation predictability across 20 annual snapshots (2007-2026) of 396 million codex citations from 101 million Ukrainian court decisions. Using a leave-one-out protocol over the full bipartite citation graph, we find that Adamic-Adar MRR declines 33% on a fixed set of articles (from 0.43 to 0.29) and 47% under a train/test temporal split (from 0.51 to 0.27) confirming genuine temporal decay rather than compositional shift or evaluation artifact. The decay is non-uniform: criminal procedure maintains stable co-citation patterns (MRR ~0.40), while civil law degrades from 0.35 to 0.15, coinciding with the 2017 judicial reform. Hub articles (>100K citations) resist decay, but mid-frequency articles (1K-10K) -- the practical retrieval frontier lose half their predictability. A BM25 text baseline decays even faster (31%), and embedding drift analysis with E5-large reveals a 4.3% semantic shift in how articles are cited, providing a mechanistic explanation for the observed decay. The benchmark is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/overthelex/ua-statute-retrieval.
May 12, 2026cs.CL

PRISM: Pareto-Efficient Retrieval over Intent-Aware Structured Memory for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon language agents accumulate conversation history far faster than any fixed context window can hold, making memory management critical to both answer accuracy and serving cost. Existing approaches either expand the context window without addressing what is retrieved, perform heavy ingestion-time fact extraction at substantial token cost, or rely on heuristic graph traversal that leaves both accuracy and efficiency on the table. We present PRISM, a training-free retrieval-side framework that treats long-horizon memory as a joint retrieval-and-compression problem over a graph-structured memory. PRISM combines four orthogonal inference-time components: Hierarchical Bundle Search over typed relation paths, Query-Sensitive Edge Costing that aligns traversal with detected query intent, Evidence Compression that compresses the candidate bundle into a compact answer-side context, and Adaptive Intent Routing that routes most queries through zero-LLM tiers. By formulating retrieval as min-cost selection over typed path templates and pairing it with an LLM-side compression step, PRISM surfaces the right evidence under a strict context budget without any fine-tuning or modification to the upstream ingestion pipeline. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that PRISM delivers substantially higher LLM-judge accuracy than every same-protocol baseline at an order-of-magnitude smaller context budget, occupying a previously empty corner of the accuracy-context-cost frontier and demonstrating a superior balance between answer quality and retrieval efficiency.
May 8, 2026cs.AI

SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agents

Skill libraries have become a practical way for LLM agents to reuse procedural experience across tasks. However, existing systems typically treat skills as flat, single-resolution prompt blocks. This creates a tension between relevance and cost: injecting coarse skills can introduce irrelevant or misleading context, while rewriting entire skills is expensive and often unnecessary. We propose SkillLens, a hierarchical skill-evolution framework that organizes skills into a four-layer graph of policies, strategies, procedures, and primitives, and retrieves them at mixed granularity. Given a task, SkillLens first retrieves semantically relevant skill seeds, expands them through degree-corrected random walk over the skill graph, and then uses a verifier to decide whether each visited unit should be accepted, decomposed, rewritten, or skipped. This enables the agent to reuse compatible subskills directly while adapting only locally mismatched components. To improve the system over time, SkillLens further refines multi-granularity skills and verifier in order to improve its routing decisions. We provide theoretical analysis showing that mixed-granularity adaptation incurs sublinear cost under sparse mismatch assumptions and that the evolutionary update rule monotonically improves the validation objective until a local optimum. Across MuLocbench and ALFWorld, SkillLens consistently improves over strong skill-based baselines, achieving up to a 6.31 percentage-point Acc@1 gain for bug localization and raising agent success rate from 45.00% to 51.31%.
May 8, 2026cs.IR

LARAG: Link-Aware Retrieval Strategy for RAG Systems in Hyperlinked Technical Documentation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the factual grounding of Large Language Models by conditioning their outputs on external documents. However, standard embedding-based retrievers treat naturally structured corpora, such as technical manuals, as flat collections of passages, thereby overlooking the hyperlink topology that users rely on when navigating such content. We introduce LARAG (Link-Aware RAG): a lightweight, link-aware retrieval strategy that leverages the author-defined hyperlink structure already present in HTML documentation, encoding hyperlink relations as metadata in the chunk representations and exploiting them to perform a form of graph-like retrieval of locally relevant content. In a benchmark of twenty expert-designed queries over Rulex Platform technical documentation and four prompting strategies, LARAG consistently improves answer quality, achieving the highest BERTScore F1, while retrieving fewer chunks and generating fewer tokens than a baseline RAG architecture used for comparison. These results show that directly leveraging the existing hyperlink topology of technical documentation, even without explicit graph construction or inference, enables an implicit form of graph-like retrieval that yields a more faithful and efficient RAG pipeline, providing better grounding at lower cost.
May 8, 2026cs.AI

GraphReAct: Reasoning and Acting for Multi-step Graph Inference

Reasoning-acting frameworks enhance large language models (LLMs) by interleaving reasoning with actions for dynamic information acquisition. However, extending this paradigm to graph learning remains underexplored. Graph data is inherently structured, with information distributed across nodes and edges and encoded through both topology and latent representations. As a result, effective reasoning over graphs requires not only retrieving informative evidence from the graph, but also progressively refining the accumulated context during multi-step inference. In this work, we propose GraphReAct, a graph reasoning-acting framework that enables step-by-step inference over graph-structured data. Specifically, we design a graph-based action space with two complementary retrieval actions: topological retrieval, which captures local structural dependencies, and semantic retrieval, which accesses non-local but relevant evidence in the representation space. These actions dynamically expand the reasoning context. To further support multi-step reasoning, we introduce another type of action, context refinement, which distills and reorganizes accumulated information into a compact representation. By interleaving reasoning with both retrieval and refinement actions, our framework enables a progressive transition from context expansion to compression. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that GraphReAct consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of reasoning-acting for graph learning.
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.
May 8, 2026cs.IR

Topic Is Not Agenda: A Citation-Community Audit of Text Embeddings

Vector search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) rest on the assumption that cosine similarity between text embeddings reflects conceptual relatedness. We measure where this assumption breaks. We build an augmented citation graph over 3.58M scientific papers and partition it via Leiden CPM at two granularities: sub-field (L1) and research-agenda (L2, hierarchical inside each L1). Four state-of-the-art embeddings (Gemini, Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-0.6B, SPECTER2) clear the L1 bar reasonably (45-52% top-10 same-rate) but stop working at L2: only 15-21% of top-10 neighbors share the query's research agenda. In absolute terms, 8 of every 10 retrieved papers are off-agenda. The failure is universal across eight scientific domains and all four models; SPECTER2, despite its citation-based contrastive training, is the weakest. As a diagnostic probe, we test whether the same augmented graph also functions as a retrieval signal: a deliberately simple citation-count rerank reaches 57.7% top-1 L2 on top of LLM-expanded Boolean retrieval and 59.6% on top of plain BM25, on 80 curated agenda queries -- about 9 points above the best cosine retriever (Gemini, 50.6%) and 20 points above BM25 alone (39.3%). The probe isolates a slice of the agenda-matching signal the graph carries but the embeddings miss, connecting recent theoretical limits on single-vector retrieval to a concrete failure mode of scientific RAG.
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.
May 7, 2026cs.AI

Sheet as Token: A Graph-Enhanced Representation for Multi-Sheet Spreadsheet Understanding

Workbook-scale spreadsheet understanding is increasingly important for language-model-based data analysis agents, but remains challenging because relevant information is often distributed across multiple sheets with heterogeneous schemas, layouts, and implicit relationships. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches typically decompose spreadsheets into rows, columns, or blocks to improve scalability; however, such chunk-centric representations can fragment worksheets into isolated text spans and weaken global sheet-level semantics. We propose Sheet as Token, a graph-enhanced framework that treats each worksheet as a unified semantic unit for multi-sheet spreadsheet retrieval. Our method extracts schema-aware records from sheet names, column headers, representative values, and layout features, and encodes each worksheet into a compact dense token. Given a natural-language query, a Graph Retriever constructs a query-specific candidate graph over sheet tokens using semantic, query-conditioned, schema-consistency, and shape-compatibility relations, and composes these channels through a multi-stage graph transformer to retrieve supporting sheet sets. Experiments on a constructed multi-sheet spreadsheet corpus show that sheet-level tokenization learns stable representations, and that graph-enhanced cross-sheet reasoning improves listwise retrieval over a shallow graph baseline with limited additional graph-side computation. These results suggest that sheet-level tokenization is a promising abstraction for scalable multi-sheet spreadsheet understanding.
May 7, 2026cs.AI

Text-Graph Synergy: A Bidirectional Verification and Completion Framework for RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a core paradigm for enhancing factual grounding and multi-hop reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional text-based RAG often retrieves logically irrelevant pseudo-evidence, while graph-based RAG is frequently hindered by search-time pruning, which may discard potentially valid reasoning paths. Existing hybrid approaches primarily adopt simple evidence concatenation or unidirectional enhancement, which fails to address the fundamental "Information Island" problem caused by asymmetric reasoning flows between unstructured text and structured graphs. We propose \textbf{TGS-RAG}, a unified framework for \textbf{T}ext-\textbf{G}raph \textbf{S}ynergistic enhancement. TGS-RAG introduces a bidirectional mechanism: (i) a \textbf{Graph-to-Text} channel that employs a Global Voting strategy from visited graph nodes to re-rank and refine textual evidence, filtering out semantic noise; and (ii) a \textbf{Text-to-Graph} channel that utilizes the \textbf{Memory-based Orphan Entity Bridging} algorithm. This algorithm utilizes textual cues to proactively resurrect valid but previously pruned reasoning paths from the search history without additional database overhead. Experimental results on multiple multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that TGS-RAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a superior balance between retrieval precision and computational efficiency.
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.
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

LogosKG: Hardware-Optimized Scalable and Interpretable Knowledge Graph Retrieval

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly integrated with large language models (LLMs) to provide structured, verifiable reasoning. A core operation in this integration is multi-hop retrieval, yet existing systems struggle to balance efficiency, scalability, and interpretability. We introduce LogosKG, a novel, hardware-aligned framework that enables scalable and interpretable k-hop retrieval on large KGs by building on symbolic KG formulations and executing traversal as hardware-efficient operations over decomposed subject, object, and relation representations. To scale to billion-edge graphs, LogosKG integrates degree-aware partitioning, cross-graph routing, and on-demand caching. Experiments show substantial efficiency gains over CPU and GPU baselines without loss of retrieval fidelity. With proven performance in KG retrieval, a downstream two-round KG-LLM interaction demonstrates how LogosKG enables large-scale, evidence-grounded analysis of how KG topology, such as hop distribution and connectivity, shapes the alignment between structured biomedical knowledge and LLM diagnostic reasoning, thereby opening the door for next-generation KG-LLM integration. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LARK-NLP-Lab/LogosKG, and an online demo is available at https://lark-nlp-lab-logoskg.hf.space/.
Apr 19, 2026cs.AI

EHRAG: Bridging Semantic Gaps in Lightweight GraphRAG via Hybrid Hypergraph Construction and Retrieval

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances LLMs by structuring corpus into graphs to facilitate multi-hop reasoning. While recent lightweight approaches reduce indexing costs by leveraging Named Entity Recognition (NER), they rely strictly on structural co-occurrence, failing to capture latent semantic connections between disjoint entities. To address this, we propose EHRAG, a lightweight RAG framework that constructs a hypergraph capturing both structure and semantic level relationships, employing a hybrid structural-semantic retrieval mechanism. Specifically, EHRAG constructs structural hyperedges based on sentence-level co-occurrence with lightweight entity extraction and semantic hyperedges by clustering entity text embeddings, ensuring the hypergraph encompasses both structural and semantic information. For retrieval, EHRAG performs a structure-semantic hybrid diffusion with topic-aware scoring and personalized pagerank (PPR) refinement to identify the top-k relevant documents. Experiments on four datasets show that EHRAG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining linear indexing complexity and zero token consumption for construction. Code is available at https://github.com/yfsong00/EHRAG.
Apr 19, 2026cs.CV

HSG: Hyperbolic Scene Graph

Scene graph representations enable structured visual understanding by modeling objects and their relationships, and have been widely used for multiview and 3D scene reasoning. Existing methods such as MSG learn scene graph embeddings in Euclidean space using contrastive learning and attention based association. However, Euclidean geometry does not explicitly capture hierarchical entailment relationships between places and objects, limiting the structural consistency of learned representations. To address this, we propose Hyperbolic Scene Graph (HSG), which learns scene graph embeddings in hyperbolic space where hierarchical relationships are naturally encoded through geometric distance. Our results show that HSG improves hierarchical structure quality while maintaining strong retrieval performance. The largest gains are observed in graph level metrics: HSG achieves a PP IoU of 33.17 and the highest Graph IoU of 33.51, outperforming the best AoMSG variant (25.37) by 8.14, highlighting the effectiveness of hyperbolic representation learning for scene graph modeling. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/HSG.
Apr 18, 2026cs.IR

RLM-on-KG: Heuristics First, LLMs When Needed: Adaptive Retrieval Control over Mention Graphs for Scattered Evidence

When does an LLM controller outperform rule-based traversal for knowledge graph exploration? We study this question through RLM-on-KG, a retrieval system that treats an LLM as an autonomous navigator over an RDF-encoded mention graph for grounded question answering. Unlike GraphRAG pipelines that rely on offline LLM indexing, RLM-on-KG performs entity-first, multi-hop exploration at query time using deterministic graph construction and a fixed tool set. Our central finding is a conditional advantage: the value of LLM control depends on evidence scatter and tool-calling sophistication. The paper's core claim is LLM control versus heuristic traversal, not a generic win over GraphRAG. On GraphRAG-Bench Novel (519 questions), Gemini 2.0 Flash achieves +2.47 pp F1 over a rule-based heuristic baseline (p < 0.0001), but only +0.16 pp over a GraphRAG-local variant (not significant). With a stronger controller, Claude Haiku 4.5, the gain over heuristic grows to +4.37 pp (p < 0.001) and extends to a +2.42 pp significant improvement over GraphRAG-local (p < 0.001). The gain is largest when gold evidence is scattered across 6-10 chunks (+3.21 pp) and smallest for concentrated evidence (+1.85 pp). Cross-scale validation on MuSiQue confirms that the LLM-over-heuristic advantage transfers, with expected attenuation on smaller per-question graphs. The core architectural insight is the separation of candidate discovery from ranking: the LLM adds value through exploration breadth, while final evidence selection is best handled by pure vector re-ranking. Beyond retrieval, exploration traces provide a proposed stress-test harness for structured data quality, yielding diagnostics for coverage, connectivity, provenance, and queryability.
Apr 17, 2026cs.AI

Integrating Graphs, Large Language Models, and Agents: Reasoning and Retrieval

Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, increasingly integrates graph-based representations to enhance reasoning, retrieval, and structured decision-making. Despite rapid advances, there remains limited clarity regarding when, why, where, and what types of graph-LLM integrations are most appropriate across applications. This survey provides a concise, structured overview of the design choices underlying the integration of graphs with LLMs. We categorize existing methods based on their purpose (reasoning, retrieval, generation, recommendation), graph modality (knowledge graphs, scene graphs, interaction graphs, causal graphs, dependency graphs), and integration strategies (prompting, augmentation, training, or agent-based use). By mapping representative works across domains such as cybersecurity, healthcare, materials science, finance, robotics, and multimodal environments, we highlight the strengths, limitations, and best-fit scenarios for each technique. This survey aims to offer researchers a practical guide for selecting the most suitable graph-LLM approach depending on task requirements, data characteristics, and reasoning complexity.
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%.
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.
Nov 6, 2025cs.AI

KGFR: A Foundation Retriever for Generalized Knowledge Graph Question Answering

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.
Jun 25, 2025cs.LG

The kernel of graph indices for vector search

The most popular graph indices for vector search use principles from computational geometry to build the graph. Hence, their formal graph navigability guarantees are only valid in Euclidean space. In this work, we show that machine learning can be used to build graph indices for vector search in metric and non-metric vector spaces (e.g., for inner product similarity). From this novel perspective, we introduce the Support Vector Graph (SVG), a new type of graph index that leverages kernel methods to establish the graph connectivity and that comes with formal navigability guarantees valid in metric and non-metric vector spaces. In addition, we interpret the most popular graph indices, including HNSW and DiskANN, as particular specializations of SVG and show that new navigable indices can be derived from the principles behind this specialization. Finally, we propose SVG-L0 that incorporates an ℓ0\ell_0 sparsity constraint into the SVG kernel method to build graphs with a bounded out-degree. This yields a principled way of implementing this practical requirement, in contrast to the traditional heuristic of simply truncating the out edges of each node. Additionally, we show that SVG-L0 has a self-tuning property that avoids the heuristic of using a set of candidates to find the out-edges of each node and that keeps its computational complexity in check.
May 20, 2025cs.AI

Divide by Question, Conquer by Agent: SPLIT-RAG with Question-Driven Graph Partitioning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems empower large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, yet struggle with efficiency-accuracy trade-offs when scaling to large knowledge graphs. Existing approaches often rely on monolithic graph retrieval, incurring unnecessary latency for simple queries and fragmented reasoning for complex multi-hop questions. To address these challenges, this paper propose SPLIT-RAG, a multi-agent RAG framework that addresses these limitations with question-driven semantic graph partitioning and collaborative subgraph retrieval. The innovative framework first create Semantic Partitioning of Linked Information, then use the Type-Specialized knowledge base to achieve Multi-Agent RAG. The attribute-aware graph segmentation manages to divide knowledge graphs into semantically coherent subgraphs, ensuring subgraphs align with different query types, while lightweight LLM agents are assigned to partitioned subgraphs, and only relevant partitions are activated during retrieval, thus reduce search space while enhancing efficiency. Finally, a hierarchical merging module resolves inconsistencies across subgraph-derived answers through logical verifications. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates considerable improvements compared to existing approaches.
Feb 17, 2025cs.CL

Ontology-Guided Reverse Thinking Makes Large Language Models Stronger on Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language processing. However, in knowledge graph question answering tasks (KGQA), there remains the issue of answering questions that require multi-hop reasoning. Existing methods rely on entity vector matching, but the purpose of the question is abstract and difficult to match with specific entities. As a result, it is difficult to establish reasoning paths to the purpose, which leads to information loss and redundancy. To address this issue, inspired by human reverse thinking, we propose Ontology-Guided Reverse Thinking (ORT), a novel framework that constructs reasoning paths from purposes back to conditions. ORT operates in three key phases: (1) using LLM to extract purpose labels and condition labels, (2) constructing label reasoning paths based on the KG ontology, and (3) using the label reasoning paths to guide knowledge retrieval. Experiments on the WebQSP and CWQ datasets show that ORT achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly enhances the capability of LLMs for KGQA.