Paper Detail
Rajat Sainju, Dariusz Jarosz, Hairong Shang, Michael Prince, Ryan M. Aydelott, Mathew J. Cherukara, Yine Sun, Michael D. Borland
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.
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@article{sainju2026corrective,
title = {A corrective agentic hybrid RAG and an operations-grounded evaluation for a scientific facility},
author = {Rajat Sainju and Dariusz Jarosz and Hairong Shang and Michael Prince and Ryan M. Aydelott and Mathew J. Cherukara and Yine Sun and Michael D. Borland},
year = {2026},
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 },
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24663},
keywords = {physics.acc-ph, cs.AI, cs.IR},
eprint = {2607.24663},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}