GraphRAG quality gates and release criteria

Enforcing strict structural and semantic acceptance boundaries for knowledge graph-driven architectures.

Why it matters

GraphRAG environments present unique vulnerabilities, such as traversal loop failures or structural hallucination. We construct multi-layered release criteria that audit entity grounding, monitor path recall across graph nodes, verify citation fidelity, and explicitly calculate the unsupported-claim rate to block risky builds.

GraphRAG adds failure modes naive RAG doesn't have — traversal loops, structural hallucination, alias-merge regressions — so it needs graph-specific release gates beyond top-k retrieval and latency.

graphrag_eval:
  retrieval:  { path_recall_at_5: 0.81, entity_grounding_accuracy: 0.89 }
  generation: { claim_support_rate: 0.93, unsupported_claim_rate: 0.04 }
  safety:     { pii_leak_rate: 0.0 }
  release_gate:
    fail_if: ['path_recall_at_5 < 0.78', 'unsupported_claim_rate > 0.05']

Gate on path-level grounding, not just chunk recall. A GraphRAG answer can retrieve the right chunks yet assemble them along a wrong path (the celebrity-hub problem from hybrid retrieval). path_recall and entity_grounding_accuracy catch failures that chunk-level recall is blind to.

Block on grounding even when latency is green. A release that meets its p95 SLO but regresses path-support is a quality failure — shipping it trades correctness for speed. Latency being green is never a reason to wave through a grounding regression.

Citation completeness is a gate too. Track the share of claims that carry valid per-claim evidence (from the provenance lesson). A drop there means answers are becoming less auditable even if they still 'sound' right — exactly the slow erosion gates exist to stop.

GraphRAG quality gates are a bridge inspection, not just a speed-limit check. A bridge can pass the speed sign (latency) while a structural crack (path-support regression) grows. You don't reopen the bridge because traffic flows fast; you reopen it because the structure holds.

• Only chunk-recall + latency. Symptom: path errors slip through. Fix: gate on path_recall + grounding.
• Shipping on green latency. Fix: block grounding regressions regardless of latency.
• Ignoring citation completeness. Symptom: silent loss of auditability. Fix: gate on per-claim evidence rate.
• No safety gate. Fix: pii_leak_rate and unsupported_claim_rate as hard blockers.