Bridge-RAG: An Abstract Bridge Tree Based Retrieval Augmented Generation Algorithm

Abstract

As an important paradigm for enhancing the generation quality of Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) faces the two challenges regarding retrieval accuracy and computational efficiency. This paper presents a novel RAG framework called Bridge-RAG. To overcome the accuracy challenge, we introduce the concept of abstract to bridge query entities and document chunks, providing robust semantic understanding. We organize the abstracts into a tree structure and design a multi-level retrieval strategy to ensure the inclusion of sufficient contextual information. While this hierarchical organization substantially improves answer quality, traversing the tree to locate the abstracts that contain a query entity inevitably introduces additional retrieval overhead. To restore retrieval efficiency, we further integrate the Cuckoo Filter in CFT-RAG, which provides O(1) entity lookup and naturally fits the entity-to-abstract pathway of our framework. Extensive experiments show that Bridge-RAG achieves consistent accuracy improvements across all metrics and up to $1.9\times$ faster retrieval compared to structured RAG baselines.