ArchRAG: Attributed Community-based Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2502.09891v2)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven effective in integrating external knowledge into LLMs for solving question-answer (QA) tasks. The state-of-the-art RAG approaches often use the graph data as the external data since they capture the rich semantic information and link relationships between entities. However, existing graph-based RAG approaches cannot accurately identify the relevant information from the graph and also consume large numbers of tokens in the online retrieval process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel graph-based RAG approach, called Attributed Community-based Hierarchical RAG (ArchRAG), by augmenting the question using attributed communities, and also introducing a novel LLM-based hierarchical clustering method. To retrieve the most relevant information from the graph for the question, we build a novel hierarchical index structure for the attributed communities and develop an effective online retrieval method. Experimental results demonstrate that ArchRAG outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and token cost. Moreover, ArchRAG has been successfully applied to domain knowledge QA in Huawei Cloud Computing.