Right Answer at the Right Time — Temporal Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Graph Summarization

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission9430 Authors

Keywords: Knowledge graph, Retrieval-augmented generation, Large language models

Abstract:

Question answering in temporal knowledge graphs requires retrieval that is both time-consistent and efficient. Existing RAG methods are largely semantic and typically neglect explicit temporal constraints, which leads to time-inconsistent answers and inflated token usage. We propose STAR-RAG, a temporal GraphRAG framework that relies on two key ideas: building a time-aligned rule graph and conducting propagation on this graph to narrow the search space and prioritize semantically relevant, time-consistent evidence. This design enforces temporal proximity during retrieval, reduces the candidate set of retrieval results, and lowers token consumption without sacrificing accuracy. Compared with existing temporal RAG approaches, STAR-RAG eliminates the need for heavy model training and fine-tuning, thereby reducing computational cost and significantly simplifying deployment.
Extensive experiments on real-world temporal KG datasets show that our method achieves improved answer accuracy while consuming fewer tokens than strong GraphRAG baselines.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 9430