# PolyG: Adaptive Graph Traversal for Diverse GraphRAG Questions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02112 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02112/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (2016)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14831/) (2024)
- [G-Retriever: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07630/) (2024)
- [Beyond I.I.D.: Three Levels of Generalization for Question Answering on Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07743/) (2020)
- [Anti-Money Laundering in Bitcoin: Experimenting with Graph Convolutional Networks for Financial Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02591/) (2019)
- [GNN-RAG: Graph Neural Retrieval for Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20139/) (2024)
- [Large-scale Simple Question Answering with Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02075/) (2015)
- [Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07103/) (2024)
- [Billion-scale Commodity Embedding for E-commerce Recommendation in Alibaba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02349/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination in Large Language, Image, Video and Audio Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09589/) (2024)
- [Document-Level Machine Translation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02210/) (2023)
- [Simple Is Effective: The Roles of Graphs and Large Language Models in Knowledge-Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20724/) (2024)
- [A Complete Survey on LLM-based AI Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16937/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Think Locally, Explain Globally: Graph-Guided LLM Investigations via Local Reasoning and Belief Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17915/) (2026)
- [Open-Source Agentic Hybrid RAG Framework for Scientific Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05660/) (2025)
- [GraphScout: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Exploration Ability for Agentic Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01410/) (2026)
- [GraphCert: Bootstrap Agentic Graph Reasoning with Certified Evidence Rubrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38798/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

GraphRAG enhances large language models (LLMs) to generate quality answers for user questions by retrieving related facts from external knowledge graphs. However, current GraphRAG methods are primarily evaluated on and overly tailored for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) benchmarks, which are biased towards a few specific question patterns and do not reflect the diversity of real-world questions. To better evaluate GraphRAG methods, we propose a complete four-class taxonomy to categorize the basic patterns of knowledge graph questions and use it to create PolyBench, a new GraphRAG benchmark encompassing a comprehensive set of graph questions. With the new benchmark, we find that existing GraphRAG methods fall short in effectiveness (i.e., quality of the generated answers) and/or efficiency (i.e., response time or token usage) because they adopt either a fixed graph traversal strategy or free-form exploration by LLMs for fact retrieval. However, different question patterns require distinct graph traversal strategies and context formation. To facilitate better retrieval, we propose PolyG, an adaptive GraphRAG approach by decomposing and categorizing the questions according to our proposed question taxonomy. Built on top of a unified interface and execution engine, PolyG dynamically prompts an LLM to generate a graph database query to retrieve the context for each decomposed basic question. Compared with SOTA GraphRAG methods, PolyG achieves a higher win rate in generation quality and has a low response latency and token cost. Our code and benchmark are open-source at https://github.com/Liu-rj/PolyG.