Query-Aware Spreading Activation for Multi-Hop Retrieval over Knowledge Graphs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30133v1
• Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:10:19 GMT
• Title: Query-Aware Spreading Activation for Multi-Hop Retrieval over Knowledge Graphs
• Abstract summary: In most existing systems, the question only sets the seed nodes.<n>This architecture requires loading the full graph into Python memory and an iterative solver with a variable number of iterations.<n>We propose a spreading-activation method that achieves the same query-aware.<n>retrieval with a single per-step semantic gate.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation built on knowledge graphs (Graph RAG) outperforms flat passage retrieval on multi-hop question answering by leveraging graph structure. In most existing systems, however, the question only sets the seed nodes; the subsequent traversal becomes "query-blind", depending solely on the graph structure. The exception is QAFD-RAG, which implements query-aware traversal via a flow-diffusion solver with combined edge re-weighting. This architecture requires loading the full graph into Python memory and an iterative solver with a variable number of iterations complicating integration with the graph database. We propose a spreading-activation method that achieves the same query-aware traversal with a single per-step semantic gate: the step weight is the cosine similarity between the candidate entity's description and the question, and the number of iterations is fixed. The whole retrieval procedure - seed mapping, propagation, top-K selection and context assembly - is expressed as a single Cypher query executed in one round-trip to Neo4j; the graph never leaves the database. On MuSiQue our method matches QAFD-RAG by exact match (32.80 vs 33.50) and outperforms the strongest purely-structural baseline in our comparison, HippoRAG, by 5.3 EM and 3.4 F1; on 2WikiMultiHopQA HippoRAG and QAFD-RAG retain an advantage due to their phrase-node architectures. An ablation with the gate disabled confirms that the gate is the source of a simultaneous F1 gain of 3.6 to 7.4 points and a retrieval-latency reduction by a factor of 1.5 to 4.9.

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