CI has no pgvector, so every live graph test skips there and the queries this
branch added ran in no CI job at all. These pin what holds without a
database: the four new read queries bind every value (the entity name comes
from an LLM tool call) and map their rows; empty input runs no query; a failed
query returns nothing and releases its connection. The graph tool's plumbing,
the sources_have_graph gate and the hybrid path's vector ranking get the same.
Also drops a redundant chained comparison flagged by code scanning.
Graph retrieval tied plain vector search at best and never beat it. Measured
across five corpora, the bottleneck was seeding, not the graph: the walk
started from nodes whose embeddings were computed from bare entity names, and
a whole question shares almost nothing with a name like "Quill".
Extraction now embeds each node from "name (type): description" and each
relationship as the fact it asserts ("Alder streams_to Quill: ..."), stored on
a new nullable graph_edges.fact_embedding column that ensure_vector_schema adds
in place. Entity names are canonicalised (case, punctuation, word breaks and a
cautious plural) so "VECTOR_STORE" and "vector stores" land on one node. Extraction calls run
concurrently (GRAPHRAG_EXTRACTION_WORKERS, default 8) while embedding and graph
writes stay serial on the task thread, so ordering and idempotency are
unchanged; that measured 8.4x faster with identical output.
Retrieval gains per-source options, stored under retrieval.graph and read live
at query time:
- seed_strategy: start from matching entities (default) or matching
relationships, which can reach an entity the question never names;
- passage_nodes (on): walk the source's passages alongside entities, with
PageRank damping 0.5 instead of 0.85;
- blend_vector (on): fuse the graph ranking with the source's vector ranking
by reciprocal rank.
The defaults are the measured-best configuration. Through GraphRAGRetriever,
the new seeding moved recall@4 from 0.41 to 0.68 on a multi-hop corpus and
from 0.50 to 1.00 on the docs corpus, and regressed none of the corpora
measured. Existing graphs keep name-only embeddings until rebuilt.