A corrective agentic hybrid RAG and an operations-grounded evaluation for a scientific facility
Authors: Rajat Sainju, Dariusz Jarosz, Hairong Shang, Michael Prince, Ryan M. Aydelott, Mathew J. Cherukara, Yine Sun, Michael D. Borland
Organizations: Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois 60439, USA
Abstract
Scientific user facilities accumulate decades of operational knowledge that no single search index covers: electronic logbooks, technical documents, internal wikis, operations chat messages, maintenance records, and live control-system data. We present APS-RAG, Advanced Photon Source Retrieval Augmented Generation, a deployed platform that makes the institutional knowledge at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) accessible to staff through natural-language queries, along with an operations-grounded evaluation. The retrieval engine fuses dense, sparse, and knowledge-graph (KG) channels with query-type-adaptive reciprocal-rank fusion, adds a corrective agentic loop, and runs a native-tool ReAct executor over a Model Context Protocol (MCP) tooling layer. We construct APS-Bench, a 50-question, question-answering (QA) dataset with auditable gold answers. Every retrieval-augmented variant numerically improves strict vital-nugget recall over a naive BM25 baseline (63.8%), with the full corrective Agentic GraphRAG scoring (70.3%). The cross-encoder reranker contributes significantly to answer quality: removing it and allowing the LLM to score relevance drastically reduces strict vital recall by 32.8%. The graph channel and corrective loop contribute positively as expected, but the performance gains are marginal. Additionally, we also compare the performance of open-source and closed-source LLMs in final answer synthesis. We release the APS-Bench construction methodology, the six-layer evaluation harness, and the underlying codebase, along with the '/aps-rag' retrieval agent skill framework, to support reproduction and adoption at other facilities. Together, the deployed platform and its operations-grounded evaluation present a promising workflow for trustworthy, statistically grounded AI assistance in facility operations, transferable to other large scientific instruments.
Muon collider research spans accelerator physics, detector instrumentation, and high-energy phenomenology, with relevant evidence scattered across a rapidly expanding and heterogeneous body of scientific literature. As high-energy physics (HEP) increasingly explores agent-assisted analysis workflows, efficiently locating, integrating, and verifying scientific evidence becomes an essential capability. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a promising framework for scientific question answering, integrating agentic reasoning without compromising retrieval precision remains a key challenge. In this work, we present agentic hybrid RAG, an evidence-grounded RAG framework for muon collider research. The framework combines a hybrid retriever, integrating sparse lexical and dense semantic retrieval, with an agentic reasoning module for query decomposition, evidence expansion, and grounded answer generation. To enable systematic evaluation, we construct the first benchmark for retrieval-augmented scientific question answering in the muon collider domain, comprising a curated literature corpus together with dedicated retrieval and answer-generation benchmarks covering major detector and physics research topics. Extensive evaluation shows that hybrid retrieval provides the strongest retrieval backbone, while agentic reasoning is most effective for controlled evidence expansion and answer synthesis. Built on this principle, agentic hybrid RAG consistently outperforms representative retrieval and RAG baselines in retrieval effectiveness, answer quality, evidence coverage, and factual grounding. Together, the benchmark and framework provide a foundation for evidence-grounded scientific question answering and future HEP analysis agents operating over large-scale scientific literature.
We present AgenticRAG, a practical agentic harness for retrieval and analysis over enterprise knowledge bases. Standard RAG pipelines place significant burden of grounding on the search stack, constraining the language model to a fixed candidate set chosen deep in the retrieval process. Our approach reduces this overdependence by layering a lightweight harness on top of existing enterprise search infrastructure, equipping a reasoning LLM with search, find, open, and summarize tools enabling the model to iteratively retrieve information, navigate within documents, and analyze evidence autonomously. On three open benchmarks we observe substantial gains: 49.6% recall@1 on BRIGHT (+21.8 pp over the best embedding baseline), 0.96 factuality on WixQA (+13% relative improvement), and 92% answer correctness on FinanceBench--within 2 pp of oracle access to true evidence. Ablation studies show that the most significant factor is the shift from single-shot retrieval to agentic tool use (5.9× improvement), while multi-query search and in-document navigation contribute to both quality and efficiency. We present various design choices in our agentic harness that were informed by pre-production deployments. Our results demonstrate its suitability for real-world enterprise production environments.
We introduce SciRet, a compute-aware empirical study of retrieval-augmented generation for scientific question answering over CORD-19. Rather than proposing a new model, we evaluate a fixed scientific RAG pipeline across three corpus scales: 1,034 chunks (1K papers), 5,160 chunks (5K papers), and 15,480 chunks (15K papers). The pipeline combines sentence-window chunking, BM25, BGE-M3 dense retrieval, reciprocal rank fusion, optional cross-encoder reranking, and grounded answer generation. Across these settings, hybrid retrieval is more robust than either sparse-only or dense-only retrieval in our setting, reaching Recall@10 of 1.000 at 1K and 15K. In contrast, an MS MARCO-trained cross-encoder reranker reduces precision on the scientific corpus, suggesting that domain mismatch can outweigh the benefits of stronger query-passage interaction. Generation faithfulness measured with RAGAS increases with corpus scale in our setup. Retrieval evaluation uses pseudo-relevance labels derived from the hybrid system, so we treat the results as controlled comparative evidence rather than a benchmark claim. We release code, indexes, and evaluation outputs to support replication and follow-up studies.
Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md. Hasibul Hasan, Rofiqul Alam Shehab +1