arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Corpus2Skill: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAG

Corpus2Skill is a retrieval architecture that transforms an enterprise knowledge base into a hierarchical skill directory, enabling an LLM agent to navigate from high-level summaries to specific documents and backtrack when necessary. On an enterprise customer‑support benchmark, it outperforms single‑shot dense, hybrid, hierarchical‑retrieval, and agentic RAG baselines in answer quality and grounding, with a moderate cost tradeoff. An eleven‑dataset study shows that corpus navigation excels on single‑domain corpora with a recoverable topical taxonomy but is less effective on open‑domain factoid pools or homogeneous‑tabular corpora, providing a design guideline for knowledge‑grounded systems.

By Yiqun Sun, Pengfei Wei, Lawrence B. Hsieh
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Optimist Deep Research: An Iterative, State-Centric Agent for Autonomous Literature Research

Optimist Deep Research is an open‑source agent that conducts literature research as an iterative, state‑centric process. It breaks a research question into a tree of subquestions, uses search intents to query multiple scholarly databases, and merges results into a provenance‑preserving document registry. The agent iteratively expands the registry via citation snowballing, evaluates evidence, and refines the research plan through a critic that can add, split, rephrase, deprioritize, or close subquestions, ultimately producing a report with every citation linked to a retrieved document.

By Gihan Panapitiya
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Re-ranking and Late Interaction Drive Retrieval Quality: A Controlled Comparison of RAG Strategies for Scientific Question Answering

The paper presents a controlled comparison of six retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategies for scientific question answering on a large arXiv corpus. All pipelines use the same LLM generator and evaluation protocol, differing only in retrieval design—ranging from classic dense retrieval to late‑interaction methods like ColBERTv2. The authors also release a synthetic question dataset and code to enable reproducible, large‑scale evaluation of RAG trade‑offs.

By Bhagyesh Rathi, Eshan Chawla, William B. Andreopoulos