Why Neighborhoods Matter: Traversal Context and Provenance in Agentic GraphRAG

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Terrenzi, Riccardo, von Zastrow, Maximilian, Ayvaz, Serkan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866909044086669312
author Terrenzi, Riccardo
von Zastrow, Maximilian
Ayvaz, Serkan
author_facet Terrenzi, Riccardo
von Zastrow, Maximilian
Ayvaz, Serkan
contents Retrieval-Augmented Generation can improve factuality by grounding answers in external evidence, but Agentic GraphRAG complicates what it means for citations to be faithful. In these systems, an agent explores a knowledge graph before producing an answer and a small set of citations. We frame citation faithfulness as a trajectory-level problem: final citations should not only support the answer, but also account for the graph traversal, structure, and visited-but-uncited entities that may influence it. Through controlled ablation experiments, we compare the effects of isolating, removing, and masking cited and uncited graph entities. Our results show that cited evidence is often necessary, as removing it substantially changes answers and reduces accuracy. However, citations are not sufficient, because accurate answers can also depend on uncited traversal context and surrounding graph structure. These findings suggest that citation evaluation in Agentic GraphRAG should move beyond source support toward provenance over the broader retrieval trajectory.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_15109
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why Neighborhoods Matter: Traversal Context and Provenance in Agentic GraphRAG
Terrenzi, Riccardo
von Zastrow, Maximilian
Ayvaz, Serkan
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Retrieval-Augmented Generation can improve factuality by grounding answers in external evidence, but Agentic GraphRAG complicates what it means for citations to be faithful. In these systems, an agent explores a knowledge graph before producing an answer and a small set of citations. We frame citation faithfulness as a trajectory-level problem: final citations should not only support the answer, but also account for the graph traversal, structure, and visited-but-uncited entities that may influence it. Through controlled ablation experiments, we compare the effects of isolating, removing, and masking cited and uncited graph entities. Our results show that cited evidence is often necessary, as removing it substantially changes answers and reduces accuracy. However, citations are not sufficient, because accurate answers can also depend on uncited traversal context and surrounding graph structure. These findings suggest that citation evaluation in Agentic GraphRAG should move beyond source support toward provenance over the broader retrieval trajectory.
title Why Neighborhoods Matter: Traversal Context and Provenance in Agentic GraphRAG
topic Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15109