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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10239 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10239/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge-graph and structured-knowledge RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 10 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18059/) (2024)
- [LightRAG: Simple and Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05779/) (2024)
- [Think-on-Graph: Deep and Responsible Reasoning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07697/) (2023)
- [LinearRAG: Linear Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation on Large-scale Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10114/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10150/) (2025)
- [KET-RAG: A Cost-Efficient Multi-Granular Indexing Framework for Graph-RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09304/) (2025)
- [ROGRAG: A Robustly Optimized GraphRAG Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06474/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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× and cost by over 99% relative to GraphRAG Global and DRIFT. On UltraDomain, it matches LinearRAG on overall quality while using about 14× 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.