Corpus-Guided Dual-Path Propagation for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation supports multi-hop retrieval by organizing corpus information into graphs. However, existing relation-free graph retrieval methods rely primarily on query–sentence similarity to search for evidence. This can exclude useful bridging evidence with low query similarity and activate incidental entities unrelated to the reasoning chain. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective approach called NexusRAG, which augments the relation-free Tri-Graph with a corpus-level entity neighborhood structure derived from joint entity co-occurrence and semantic similarity. NexusRAG employs this structure to guide two complementary propagation paths: neighborhood-constrained semantic propagation through sentences identifies the query-relevant entity frontier, while direct structural propagation between neighboring entities expands that frontier to structurally related entities. The propagated entity weights also inform neighborhood-aware passage initialization for Personalized PageRank. Experiments on three multi-hop QA benchmarks and a domain-specific subset of GraphRAG-Bench show that NexusRAG consistently outperforms existing approaches. On the GraphRAG-Bench subset, NexusRAG achieves the highest evidence recall in all question categories, exceeding baselines by 4.2-8.1 points.