👾 DIGIMON: Deep Analysis of Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems

GraphRAG is a popular 🔥🔥🔥 and powerful 💪💪💪 RAG system! 🚀💡 Inspired by systems like Microsoft's, graph-based RAG is unlocking endless possibilities in AI.

Our project focuses on modularizing and decoupling these methods 🧩 to unveil the mystery 🕵️‍♂️🔍✨ behind them and share fun and valuable insights! 🤩💫 Our project🔨 is included in Awesome Graph-based RAG.

Representative Methods

We select the following Graph RAG methods:

Method	Description	Link	Graph Type
RAPTOR	ICLR 2024		Tree
KGP	AAAI 2024		Passage Graph
DALK	EMNLP 2024		ER Graph
HippoRAG	NIPS 2024		ER Graph
MedGraphRAG	Medical Domain		ER Graph
G-retriever	NIPS 2024		ER Graph
ToG	ICLR 2024		ER Graph
GraphCoT	ACL 2024		ER Graph
MS GraphRAG	Microsoft Project		KG
FastGraphRAG	CircleMind Project		KG
LightRAG	High Star Project		RKG

Graph Types

Based on the entity and relation, we categorize the graph into the following types:

• Chunk Tree: A tree structure formed by document content and summary.
• Passage Graph: A relational network composed of passages, tables, and other elements within documents.
• ER Graph: An Entity-Relation Graph, which contains only entities and relations, is commonly represented as triples.
• KG: A Knowledge Graph, which enriches entities with detailed descriptions and type information.
• RKG: A Rich Knowledge Graph, which further incorporates keywords associated with relations.

The criteria for the classification of graph types are as follows:

Graph Attributes	Chunk Tree	Passage Graph	ER	KG	RKG
Original Content	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
Entity Name	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Entity Type	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Entity Description	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Relation Name	❌	❌	✅	❌	✅
Relation keyword	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅
Relation Description	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Edge Weight	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅

Operators in the Retrieve Stage

The retrieval stage lies the key role ‼️ in the entire GraphRAG process. ✨ The goal is to identify query-relevant content that supports the generation phase, enabling the LLM to provide more accurate responses.

💡💡💡 After thoroughly reviewing all implementations, we've distilled them into a set of 16 operators 🧩🧩. Each method then constructs its retrieval module by combining one or more of these operators 🧩.

Five Types of Operators

We classify the operators into five categories, each offering a different way to retrieve and structure relevant information from graph-based data.

📄 Chunk Operators

retrieve the most relevant text segments (chunks) related to the query.

Name	Description	Example Methods
by_ppr	Uses Personalized PageRank to identify relevant chunks.	HippoRAG
by_relationship	Finds chunks that contain specified relationships.	LightRAG
entity_occurrence	Retrieves chunks where both entities of an edge frequently appear together.	Local Search for MS GraphRAG

⭕️ Entity Operators

retrieve entities (e.g., people, places, organizations) that are most relevant to the given query.

Name	Description	Example Methods
by_relationship	Use key relationships to retrieve relevant entities	LightRAG
by_vdb	Find entities by vector-database	G-retriever、 MedicalRAG、RAPTOR、KGP
by_agent	Utilizes LLM to find the useful entities	TOG
by_ppr	Use PPR to retrieve entities	FastGraphRAG

➡️ Relationship Operators

extracting useful relationships for the given query.

Name	Description	Example Methods
by_vdb	Retrieve relationships by vector-database	LightRAG、G-retriever
by_agent	Utilizes LLM to find the useful entities	TOG
by_entity	One-hot neighbors of the key entities	Local Search for MS GraphRAG
by_ppr	Use PPR to retrieve relationships	FastGraphRAG

🔗 Community Operators

Identify high-level information, which is only used for MS GraphRAG.

Name	Description	Example Methods
by_entity	Detects communities containing specified entities	Local Search for MS GraphRAG
by_level	Returns all communities below a specified level	Global Search for MS GraphRAG

📈 Subgraph Operators

Extract a relevant subgraph for the given query

Name	Description	Example Methods
by_path	Retrieves a path	DALK
by_Steiner Tree	Constructs a minimal connecting subgraph (Steiner tree)	G-retriever
induced_subgraph	Extracts a subgraph induced by a set of entities and relationships.	TOG

You can freely 🪽 combine those operators 🧩 to create more and more GraphRAG methods.

🌰 Examples

Below, we present some examples illustrating how existing algorithms leverage these operators.

Name	Operators
HippoRAG	Chunk (by_ppr)
LightRAG	Chunk (by_relationship) + Entity (by_relationship) + Relationship (by_vdb)
FastGraphRAG	Chunk (by_ppr) + Entity (by_ppr) + Relationship (by_ppr)

📖 See Our Paper

For a detailed analysis, check out our paper:

📄 In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Framework (arXiv preprint 2503.04338)