[2602.23372] Democratizing GraphRAG: Linear, CPU-Only Graph Retrieval for Multi-Hop QA

Computer Science > Information Retrieval arXiv:2602.23372 (cs) [Submitted on 27 Dec 2025] Title:Democratizing GraphRAG: Linear, CPU-Only Graph Retrieval for Multi-Hop QA Authors:Qizhi Wang View a PDF of the paper titled Democratizing GraphRAG: Linear, CPU-Only Graph Retrieval for Multi-Hop QA, by Qizhi Wang View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:GraphRAG systems improve multi-hop retrieval by modeling structure, but many approaches rely on expensive LLM-based graph construction and GPU-heavy inference. We present SPRIG (Seeded Propagation for Retrieval In Graphs), a CPU-only, linear-time, token-free GraphRAG pipeline that replaces LLM graph building with lightweight NER-driven co-occurrence graphs and uses Personalized PageRank (PPR) for 28% with negligible Recall@10 changes. The results characterize when CPU-friendly graph retrieval helps multi-hop recall and when strong lexical hybrids (RRF) are sufficient, outlining a realistic path to democratizing GraphRAG without token costs or GPU requirements. Comments: Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) MSC classes: 68T50 (Primary) 68P20, 68T05 (Secondary) ACM classes: H.3.3; I.2.7; I.2.6 Cite as: arXiv:2602.23372 [cs.IR]   (or arXiv:2602.23372v1 [cs.IR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.23372 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Qizhi Wang [view email] [v1] Sat, 27 Dec 2025 04:25:06 UTC (69 KB) Full-t...