In plain words: Builds a graph from words that appear together instead of an AI-built one, then ranks passages by their links to the query's starting points on a plain computer. It kept multi-hop recall nearly unchanged versus AI-built graphs, though simple word-matching blends were just as good.
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.
Qizhi Wang
arXiv:2602.23372 · cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Dec 27, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 13 pages, 14 figures, 26 tables