LivingRAG: Augmenting Graph RAG with Experience

Yuzhuo Cui, Zongye Zhang, Qingjie Liu


Abstract
Graph-based RAG improves multi-hop question answering by organizing evidence as a knowledge graph. However, most existing RAG systems process each query in isolation and discard useful reasoning from the LLM’s response after inference. As a result, later related queries need to retrieve evidence and reason from scratch. We propose LivingRAG, a Graph RAG framework with writable and reusable reasoning experience. LivingRAG adds a writable experience store to a graph-based retrieval backbone, enabling verified experiences to be reused during inference in two ways. Stored graph signals help retrieval find entities and passages that were useful in earlier related queries. Stored summaries provide a reference reasoning pattern for answer generation. We analyze online QA streams and find reusable signals from shared entities, graph neighborhoods, and question templates. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks show that LivingRAG improves accuracy over strong RAG baselines and reduces completion-token use when relevant prior experience is reused.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1578
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
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33604–33628
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1578/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuzhuo Cui, Zongye Zhang, and Qingjie Liu. 2026. LivingRAG: Augmenting Graph RAG with Experience. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 33604–33628, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LivingRAG: Augmenting Graph RAG with Experience (Cui et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1578.pdf