# Query-Centric Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21237 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21237/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 22 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)
- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Knowledge-graph and structured-knowledge RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/knowledge-graph-and-structured-knowledge-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08921/) (2024)
- [LightRAG: Simple and Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05779/) (2024)
- [MultiHop-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-Hop Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15391/) (2024)
- [Document Expansion by Query Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08375/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs (GraphRAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00309/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07437/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13958/) (2025)
- [MiniRAG: Towards Extremely Simple Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06713/) (2025)
- [Doc2Query--: When Less is More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03266/) (2023)
- [KG-Retriever: Efficient Knowledge Indexing for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05547/) (2024)
- [Towards Practical GraphRAG: Efficient Knowledge Graph Construction and Hybrid Retrieval at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03226/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Lexical Graph for Enhanced Multi-Hop Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08074/) (2025)
- [Mixture-of-PageRanks: Replacing Long-Context with Real-Time, Sparse GraphRAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06078/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Token Co-occurrence Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enriches large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge for long-context understanding and multi-hop reasoning, but existing methods face a granularity dilemma: fine-grained entity-level graphs incur high token costs and lose context, while coarse document-level graphs fail to capture nuanced relations. We introduce QCG-RAG, a query-centric graph RAG framework that enables query-granular indexing and multi-hop chunk retrieval. Our query-centric approach leverages Doc2Query and Doc2Query{-}{-} to construct query-centric graphs with controllable granularity, improving graph quality and interpretability. A tailored multi-hop retrieval mechanism then selects relevant chunks via the generated queries. Experiments on LiHuaWorld and MultiHop-RAG show that QCG-RAG consistently outperforms prior chunk-based and graph-based RAG methods in question answering accuracy, establishing a new paradigm for multi-hop reasoning.