HyperSU: Corpus-Driven Semantic-Unit Hypergraph for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Jiate Liu, Liuyi Chen, Zhengyi Yang, Chuan He, Mingchen Ju, Bocheng Han, Ruyi Liu, Xu Zhou


Abstract
Recent Hypergraph-based retrieval-augmented generation (HyperRAG) methods use hyperedges to connect multiple entities simultaneously, enabling more efficient multi-entity evidence organization than pairwise graph structures. However, existing HyperRAG methods often rely on LLM-generated summaries to construct hyperedges, which can introduce hallucinations while also incurring high indexing costs. In addition, during retrieval, existing methods typically rely on either one-hop neighbor expansion or PageRank diffusion. The former may miss useful multi-hop evidence, while the latter can suffer from uncontrolled propagation over excessive hub nodes, leading to semantic drift and noisy reasoning chains. To address these challenges, we propose HyperSU, a novel hypergraph-based RAG framework featuring semantic-unit hyperedges and clue-guided bidirectional retrieval. During construction, HyperSU formulates hyperedge construction as an entity-aware minimum-description-length (MDL) optimization problem, inducing source-grounded semantic-unit hyperedges that balance sentence-level semantic coherence and entity compactness. It then constructs a hypergraph by modeling each semantic unit as a hyperedge over its co-mentioned entities. During retrieval, HyperSU performs clue-guided bidirectional expansion over the semantic-unit hypergraph, enabling both multi-hop evidence discovery and evidence-anchored noise reduction. Experiments show that HyperSU consistently improves answer accuracy over standard, graph-based, and hypergraph-based RAG baselines, raising average accuracy on GraphRAG-Bench by 5.5 points over the strongest baseline (68.7 vs. 63.2), with larger gains on reasoning-intensive tasks, where the relative improvement reaches 14.1%. Our code is available at https://github.com/RAIDSLab/HyperSU.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1058
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
22399–22424
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1058/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Jiate Liu, Liuyi Chen, Zhengyi Yang, Chuan He, Mingchen Ju, Bocheng Han, Ruyi Liu, and Xu Zhou. 2026. HyperSU: Corpus-Driven Semantic-Unit Hypergraph for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 22399–22424, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HyperSU: Corpus-Driven Semantic-Unit Hypergraph for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Liu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1058.pdf