MOSAIC: Query-Aware Exploration Policy Adaptation for GraphRAG

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) can connect evidence distributed across a corpus graph, but most systems use largely shared exploration procedures across queries. This creates a structural mismatch: direct facts may need compact local neighborhoods, comparisons need balanced coverage of multiple targets, and mediated questions may require deeper paths through weakly related connectors. We present Mosaic, a training-free framework that formulates GraphRAG retrieval as a per-query control problem. An LLM analyzer converts query-specific evidence requirements into a bounded policy over seed selection, graph traversal, stopping, and evidence selection, while the corpus graph, indexes, scoring functions, grounding procedure, and answer generator remain shared. On GraphRAG-Bench, Mosaic achieves query-weighted Answer Correctness of 76.97 on Medical and 64.33 on Novel, improving over the strongest previously reported overall results by 5.13 and 4.43 points. On Medical, it reaches 95.1 Evidence Recall and 86.1 Context Relevancy. Controlled comparisons on an identical graph and generator show that no fixed narrow, medium, or wide policy is consistently optimal; Mosaic improves by 9.96 points over the strongest canonical fixed policy. Relative to Fixed Wide, it evaluates 81.9% fewer paths and retains 47.2% fewer evidence items. Transfer experiments on HotpotQA, MuSiQue, and 2WikiMultiHopQA further show that the policy interface can be applied without benchmark-specific retriever training.