TERAG: Token-Efficient Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Qiao Xiao, Hong Ting Tsang, Jiaxin Bai
Published: 2025/9/23
Abstract
Graph-based Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a widely studied approach for improving the reasoning, accuracy, and factuality of Large Language Models. However, many existing graph-based RAG systems overlook the high cost associated with LLM token usage during graph construction, hindering large-scale adoption. To address this, we propose TERAG, a simple yet effective framework designed to build informative graphs at a significantly lower cost. Inspired by HippoRAG, we incorporate Personalized PageRank (PPR) during the retrieval phase, and we achieve at least 80% of the accuracy of widely used graph-based RAG methods while consuming only 3%-11% of the output tokens.