CausalRAG2: Hierarchical Causal Knowledge Graph Design for RAG

Abstract

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has enhanced large language models by enabling access to external knowledge, with graph-based RAG emerging as a powerful paradigm for structured retrieval and reasoning. However, existing graph-based methods often over-rely on entity-centric node matching and lack explicit causal modeling, leading to unfaithful or spurious answers. Prior attempts to incorporate causality are typically limited to local or single-document contexts and also suffer from information isolation that arises from modular graph structures, which hinders scalability and cross-module causal reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose CausalRAG2, a framework that rethinks knowledge organization for graph-based RAG through causal gating across hierarchical modules. CausalRAG2 explicitly models causal relationships to suppress spurious correlations while enabling scalable reasoning over large-scale knowledge graphs. We also introduce HolisQA, a benchmark for holistic comprehension beyond entity-centric matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalRAG2 consistently outperforms competitive graph-based RAG baselines across multiple datasets and evaluation metrics. Our work establishes a principled foundation for structured, scalable, and causally grounded RAG systems. Our code and HolisQA benchmark are available at https://github.com/Pwnb/CausalRAG2.