HugRAG: Hierarchical Causal Knowledge Graph Design for RAG

Abstract: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has enhanced LLMs by enabling access to external knowledge, with graph-based RAG emerging as a powerful paradigm for structured retrieval and reasoning. However, existing graph-based methods often over-rely on surface-level node matching and lack explicit causal modeling, leading to unfaithful or spurious answers. Prior attempts to incorporate causality are typically limited to local or single-document contexts and also suffer from information isolation that arises from modular graph structures, which hinders scalability and cross-module causal reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose HugRAG, a framework that rethinks knowledge organization for graph-based RAG through causal gating across hierarchical modules. HugRAG explicitly models causal relationships to suppress spurious correlations while enabling scalable reasoning over large-scale knowledge graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HugRAG consistently outperforms competitive graph-based RAG baselines across multiple datasets and evaluation metrics. Our work establishes a principled foundation for structured, scalable, and causally grounded RAG systems.