# Beyond Linear Context: Graph-Guided Evidence Navigation for Long-Novel Reasoning with a Local 9B Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22939/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14831/) (2024)
- [Found in the Middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16008/) (2024)
- [LongRAG: A Dual-Perspective Retrieval-Augmented Generation Paradigm for Long-Context Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18050/) (2024)
- [GraphReader: Building Graph-based Agent to Enhance Long-Context Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14550/) (2024)
- [DetectiveQA: Evaluating Long-Context Reasoning on Detective Novels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02465/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-context models read a novel the way a person reads a printout: one token after another, in narrative order, with the whole history competing for a fixed budget of attention. A detective does not work that way. They sort what happened when, and they keep a map of who relates to whom, so a clue from chapter one can meet a question asked at the end of the book. We test whether a frozen knowledge graph can give a small local model that same freedom. Thirty detective novels and 234 multiple-choice questions are answered by one fixed qwen3.5:9b reader under nine conditions: five graph routes, a recent-window baseline, whole-book compression, ordinary vector retrieval, and a question-only control. The strongest graph route reaches 53.85% (126/234) against 46.15% for the recent window, 51.28% for compression, 51.71% for vector retrieval and 40.17% for question-only. On the subset that no model can answer without the book, the graph route reaches 42.86%. None of the fifteen graph-baseline contrasts survives Holm correction, so we present the result as exploratory evidence about a design. Two structural findings survive scrutiny better than the headline number: annotated evidence concentrates in the topological core of these graphs (2.35x enrichment, pooled), and the two graph-building pipelines differ so much in annotation coverage (16% versus 73% of clue paragraphs) that pooled accuracy alone would hide which bottleneck is being measured.