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Equation 15 · Naive, Graph, and Agentic: A Systems Comparison of RAG Architectures

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CindexC_{\text{index}}

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CindexC_{\text{index}}

Symbol C_index

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subscript

subscript

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This is the one family among the five whose defining engineering trade-off is temporal rather than architectural: cost is shifted from query time to index time. Writing CindexC_{\text{index}} for the one-time cost of building the graph and its community summaries, and cmarginalc_{\text{marginal}} for the cost of answering a single query against the finished structure, the amortised cost of a query workload of size Q against one graph is

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