Structure Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Factual Queries

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, Miao, Zhang, Xiao, Li, Yi, Lv, Chunli
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Xie, Miao
Zhang, Xiao
Li, Yi
Lv, Chunli
author_facet Xie, Miao
Zhang, Xiao
Li, Yi
Lv, Chunli
contents Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), where generated outputs may be factually incorrect. However, existing RAG approaches predominantly rely on vector similarity for retrieval, which is prone to semantic noise and fails to ensure that generated responses fully satisfy the complex conditions specified by factual queries, often leading to incorrect answers. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel research problem, named Exact Retrieval Problem (ERP). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first problem formulation that explicitly incorporates structural information into RAG for factual questions to satisfy all query conditions. For this novel problem, we propose Structure Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SG-RAG), which models the retrieval process as an embedding-based subgraph matching task, and uses the retrieved topological structures to guide the LLM to generate answers that meet all specified query conditions. To facilitate evaluation of ERP, we construct and publicly release Exact Retrieval Question Answering (ERQA), a large-scale dataset comprising 120000 fact-oriented QA pairs, each involving complex conditions, spanning 20 diverse domains. The experimental results demonstrate that SG-RAG significantly outperforms strong baselines on ERQA, delivering absolute improvements from 20.68 to 50.88 points across all evaluation metrics, while maintaining reasonable computational overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22843
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structure Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Factual Queries
Xie, Miao
Zhang, Xiao
Li, Yi
Lv, Chunli
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), where generated outputs may be factually incorrect. However, existing RAG approaches predominantly rely on vector similarity for retrieval, which is prone to semantic noise and fails to ensure that generated responses fully satisfy the complex conditions specified by factual queries, often leading to incorrect answers. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel research problem, named Exact Retrieval Problem (ERP). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first problem formulation that explicitly incorporates structural information into RAG for factual questions to satisfy all query conditions. For this novel problem, we propose Structure Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SG-RAG), which models the retrieval process as an embedding-based subgraph matching task, and uses the retrieved topological structures to guide the LLM to generate answers that meet all specified query conditions. To facilitate evaluation of ERP, we construct and publicly release Exact Retrieval Question Answering (ERQA), a large-scale dataset comprising 120000 fact-oriented QA pairs, each involving complex conditions, spanning 20 diverse domains. The experimental results demonstrate that SG-RAG significantly outperforms strong baselines on ERQA, delivering absolute improvements from 20.68 to 50.88 points across all evaluation metrics, while maintaining reasonable computational overhead.
title Structure Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Factual Queries
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22843