Don't Retrieve, Navigate: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAG

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

Corpus2Skill (C2S) is an agentic RAG system that replaces traditional vector/BM25 retrieval with a navigable skill hierarchy tree, allowing LLMs to browse enterprise knowledge directly at query time without embedding models or retrieval indexes.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM responses in external evidence but treats the model as a passive consumer of search results: it never sees how the corpus is organized or what it has not yet retrieved, limiting its ability to backtrack or combine scattered evidence. We present Corpus2Skill, which distills a document corpus into a hierarchical skill directory offline and lets an LLM agent navigate it at serve time. The compilation pipeline iteratively clusters documents, generates LLM-written summaries at each level, and materializes the result as a tree of navigable skill files. At serve time, the agent receives a bird's-eye view of the corpus, drills into topic branches via progressively finer summaries, and retrieves full documents by ID. Because the hierarchy is explicitly visible, the agent can reason about where to look, backtrack from unproductive paths, and combine evidence across branches. On WixQA, an enterprise customer-support benchmark for RAG, Corpus2Skill outperforms dense retrieval, RAPTOR, and agentic RAG baselines across all quality metrics.
Original Article
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Paper page - Don’t Retrieve, Navigate: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAG

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.14572 We built and released Corpus2Skill (C2S), an agentic RAG system that replaces the traditional vector/BM25 retrieval stack with a navigable skill hierarchy the LLM browses directly at query time. On enterprise-style QA benchmarks, C2S matches or beats strong retrieval baselines with no retrieval system at serve time.

C2S compiles any corpus offline into a tree of Anthropic Skills — SKILL.md summaries at each level and document IDs at the leaves. At query time the LLM walks the tree (ls/cat via code execution) and pulls full documents via a get_document tool. No vector DB, no BM25 index, no embedding model at serve time.

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