# HyCE-RAG: Hypergraph Chain-of-Evidence Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.

## 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, 20 of 20)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10509/) (2022)
- [How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08910/) (2020)
- [Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08302/) (2023)
- [Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12756/) (2020)
- [HyperGraphRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Hypergraph-Structured Knowledge Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21322/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06864/) (2025)
- [LinearRAG: Linear Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation on Large-scale Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10114/) (2025)
- [Multi-hop Question Answering via Reasoning Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02610/) (2019)
- [Retrieve, Summarize, Plan: Advancing Multi-hop Question Answering with an Iterative Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13101/) (2024)
- [GraphRAG-Bench: Challenging Domain-Specific Reasoning for Evaluating Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02404/) (2025)
- [Multi-perspective Improvement of Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01972/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [From Chunks to Functional Evidence: Function-Aware Retrieval for EDA Documentation QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09361/) (2026)
- [PANINI-DR: Controlled Deep Research through Generative Semantic Workspaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15208/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-hop question answering requires systems to retrieve evidence from multiple documents and connect scattered facts into a coherent reasoning process. Standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mainly relies on semantic similarity between a query and text chunks, and therefore often fails to model structural relations among entities, facts, and evidence units. Graph-based RAG improves this by introducing graph-structured knowledge, but pairwise edges are still limited in representing higher-order associations involving multiple entities and contexts. We propose HyCE-RAG, a Hypergraph Chain-of-Evidence Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for explainable multi-hop question answering. HyCE-RAG organizes entities, relations, and contextual evidence into hyperedges, builds a query-aware evidence hypergraph, and performs confidence propagation over entity--hyperedge incidence structures. It then uses confidence-guided evidence assembly to select, connect, and rank evidence paths before answer generation. The scoring process jointly considers semantic relevance, entity connectivity, evidence coverage, relation reliability, extraction confidence, and propagated confidence. By providing the language model with structured evidence chains rather than flat retrieved passages, HyCE-RAG supports more faithful and interpretable reasoning. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and two GraphRAG-Bench subsets show that HyCE-RAG consistently outperforms standard RAG and graph-based RAG baselines in answer accuracy, context relevance, and faithfulness. These results suggest that hypergraph-based evidence organization is a promising direction for post-retrieval reasoning in complex question answering.