MS-RAG: Simple and Effective Multi-Semantic Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Xiaozhou You, Yahui Luo, Lihong Gu


Abstract
To alleviate the hallucination problem of large language model (LLM), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been proposed and widely adopted. Due to the limitations in cross-chunk summarization task of naive RAG, graph-based RAG has emerged as a promising solution. However, a close study reveals several flaws in these works. First, most graph-based RAGs suffer from less efficient indexing process, which leads to information loss and expensive costs. Second, they heavily rely on LLM for retrieval thus inference slowly, which hinders their application in industry. To build a more efficient and effective RAG, we propose the multi-semantic RAG (MS-RAG). In this work, we combine knowledge graphs with dense vector to build a multi-semantic RAG. To be specific, (i) at indexing stage, we create multiple semantic-level indexes, including chunk-level, relation-level, and entity-level, to leverage the merits of dense vector and knowledge graph. (ii) at retrieval stage, unlike the previous LLM-empowered entity extraction, we propose a novel mix recall algorithm. Finally, we employ a multi-semantic rerank module to purify the results. Extensive experiments show that MS-RAG achieves superior performance. In terms of retrieval effect, MS-RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance, which is about 10%-30% improvement than the existing methods. In terms of question-answering effect, MS-RAG still achieves promising results with faster inference speed. More analysis and experiments are provided in Appendix.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1151
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22620–22636
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.emnlp-main.1151/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1151
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaozhou You, Yahui Luo, and Lihong Gu. 2025. MS-RAG: Simple and Effective Multi-Semantic Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 22620–22636, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MS-RAG: Simple and Effective Multi-Semantic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (You et al., EMNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.emnlp-main.1151.pdf
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