让检索增强生成系统学会时间感,动态追踪知识演变。
RAG Meets Temporal Graphs: Time-Sensitive Modeling and Retrieval for Evolving Knowledge
- 构建双层时序图:用带时间戳的关系和层级时间结构表示演化知识
- 支持增量更新,新知识可快速融合且不影响旧信息的准确性
- 提出新数据集ECT-QA,专门评测系统在时间变化下的检索稳定性
知识具有固有时序性且持续演化。当前检索增强生成(RAG)系统虽能引入外部知识,却忽视了这一特性,带来两大挑战:一是缺乏有效的时间感知表示,相同事实在不同时期难以区分;二是多数评估基于静态语料库,忽略知识更新成本与检索稳定性。为此,本文提出时序图RAG(TG-RAG),将外部语料建模为双层时序图——包含带时间戳关系的时序知识图谱与层级时间图。每个时间节点生成多粒度时间摘要,捕捉关键事件与整体趋势。该设计支持增量更新:从新语料中提取新时序事实并融入现有图谱。时序图显式区分同一事实在不同时间的表达,避免歧义;时间层级图仅需生成新增叶子节点及其祖先的报告,提升效率。推理时,TG-RAG动态检索符合时间与语义范围的子图,实现精准证据获取。此外,我们构建了ECT-QA数据集,包含具体与抽象问题,配套评估协议以测试RAG系统的增量更新能力。大量实验表明,TG-RAG显著优于现有基线,在处理时序知识与增量更新方面表现优异。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Knowledge is inherently time-sensitive and continuously evolves over time. Although current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enrich LLMs with external knowledge, they largely ignore this temporal nature. This raises two challenges for RAG. First, current RAG methods lack effective time-aware representations. Same facts of different time are difficult to distinguish with vector embeddings or conventional knowledge graphs. Second, most RAG evaluations assume a static corpus, leaving a blind spot regarding update costs and retrieval stability as knowledge evolves. To make RAG time-aware, we propose Temporal GraphRAG (TG-RAG), which models external corpora as a bi-level temporal graph consisting of a temporal knowledge graph with timestamped relations and a hierarchical time graph. Multi-granularity temporal summaries are generated for each time node to capture both key events and broader trends at that time. The design supports incremental updates by extracting new temporal facts from the incoming corpus and merging them into the existing graph. The temporal graph explicitly represents identical facts at different times as distinct edges to avoid ambiguity, and the time hierarchy graph allows only generating reports for new leaf time nodes and their ancestors, ensuring effective and efficient updates. During inference, TG-RAG dynamically retrieves a subgraph within the temporal and semantic scope of the query, enabling precise evidence gathering. Moreover, we introduce ECT-QA, a time-sensitive question-answering dataset featuring both specific and abstract queries, along with a comprehensive evaluation protocol designed to assess incremental update capabilities of RAG systems. Extensive experiments show that TG-RAG significantly outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in handling temporal knowledge and incremental updates.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。