# MOSAIC: Query-Aware Exploration Policy Adaptation for GraphRAG

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11065 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11065/

## 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 15 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 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, 15 of 15)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [Active Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06983/) (2023)
- [Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14403/) (2024)
- [LightRAG: Simple and Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05779/) (2024)
- [HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14831/) (2024)
- [PathRAG: Pruning Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation with Relational Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14902/) (2025)
- [GFM-RAG: Graph Foundation Model for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01113/) (2025)
- [GraphRAG-Bench: Challenging Domain-Specific Reasoning for Evaluating Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02404/) (2025)
- [Relink: Constructing Query-Driven Evidence Graph On-the-Fly for GraphRAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07192/) (2026)
- [Use Graph When It Needs: Efficiently and Adaptively Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03578/) (2026)
- [DOTRAG: Retrieval-Time Reasoning Along Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18760/) (2026)
- [PAGE-RAG: Evidence-Grounded Adaptive Graph Retrieval for Long-Document Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19301/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) can connect evidence distributed across a corpus graph, but most systems use largely shared exploration procedures across queries. This creates a structural mismatch: direct facts may need compact local neighborhoods, comparisons need balanced coverage of multiple targets, and mediated questions may require deeper paths through weakly related connectors. We present Mosaic, a training-free framework that formulates GraphRAG retrieval as a per-query control problem. An LLM analyzer converts query-specific evidence requirements into a bounded policy over seed selection, graph traversal, stopping, and evidence selection, while the corpus graph, indexes, scoring functions, grounding procedure, and answer generator remain shared. On GraphRAG-Bench, Mosaic achieves query-weighted Answer Correctness of 76.97 on Medical and 64.33 on Novel, improving over the strongest previously reported overall results by 5.13 and 4.43 points. On Medical, it reaches 95.1 Evidence Recall and 86.1 Context Relevancy. Controlled comparisons on an identical graph and generator show that no fixed narrow, medium, or wide policy is consistently optimal; Mosaic improves by 9.96 points over the strongest canonical fixed policy. Relative to Fixed Wide, it evaluates 81.9% fewer paths and retains 47.2% fewer evidence items. Transfer experiments on HotpotQA, MuSiQue, and 2WikiMultiHopQA further show that the policy interface can be applied without benchmark-specific retriever training.