GRACE-RAG: Governed Retrieval Architecture for Canonical Evidence Synthesis, Enabling Lightweight Deployment in Closed-Domain Institutional Settings

arXiv:2607.00013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are widely used in institutional question answering settings where responses must be grounded in authoritative documentation (Gao et al., 2023). In entity-dense domains where relevant information is distributed across heterogeneous documents, vector-only retrieval often produces fragmented evidence and increases dependence on inference-time reasoning (Zhao et al., 2024). This paper introduces GRACE-RAG, a retrieval-governed, graph-augmented RAG architecture that externalizes structural reasoning from