FlexStructRAG: Flexible Structure-Aware Multi-Granular Relational Retrieval for RAG

TL;DR

FlexStructRAG introduces a flexible, multi-granular retrieval framework for RAG systems that adaptively combines various knowledge structures to improve evidence relevance and contextual understanding.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework supporting multi-granular, query-adaptive retrieval over heterogeneous knowledge representations, including knowledge graphs, hypergraphs, and semantic clusters.

Findings

Improves semantic evaluation scores over strong RAG baselines.

Demonstrates the importance of multi-granular relational retrieval.

Shows effectiveness across four different domains.

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems critically depend on how external knowledge is segmented, structured, and retrieved. Most existing approaches either retrieve fixed-length text chunks, which fragments discourse context, or commit to a single structured index (e.g., a knowledge graph or hypergraph), which hard-codes one relational granularity. This often yields brittle retrieval when queries require different forms of evidence, such as local binary relations, higher-order interactions, or broader document-grounded context. We propose \textbf{FlexStructRAG}, a flexible structure-aware RAG framework that supports \emph{multi-granular, query-adaptive retrieval} over heterogeneous knowledge representations. FlexStructRAG jointly constructs (i) a knowledge graph for binary relations, (ii) a knowledge hypergraph for n-ary relations, and (iii) structure-aware semantic clusters that aggregate relational evidence into document-grounded context units. To reduce semantic fragmentation induced by uniform chunking, we introduce dynamic partitioning and a truncated sliding-window extraction mechanism that incorporates bounded contextual dependencies during knowledge construction. At inference time, FlexStructRAG enables entity-, edge-, hyperedge-, and cluster-level retrieval, which can be flexibly combined to supply generation with relationally and contextually aligned evidence. Experiments on the UltraDomain benchmark across four domains show that FlexStructRAG improves semantic evaluation over strong RAG baselines. Ablation and sensitivity analysis further demonstrate the necessity of multi-granular relational retrieval and structure-aware clustering.