Claire Na Cheng
Author directoryAlso published as: Claire Cheng
2026
Frustratingly Easy Agentic RAG via Portable Skills: A Case Study in Customer Support
Istok Bako | Bonan Min | Qihong Shao | Claire Cheng | Yashar Mehdad
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Istok Bako | Bonan Min | Qihong Shao | Claire Cheng | Yashar Mehdad
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Enterprise workflow automation typically requires retrieving a complete and accurate set of relevant information from large operational document corpora (SOPs, policy documents) given a specific scenario or request. In customer support (CS), for example, human specialists must determine the correct sequence of resolution steps for each case, a task that demands precise grounding in policy documentation. Meeting this bar in production typically requires complex document chunking, indexing, and retrieval pipelines, often layered with learned re-rankers, query rewriters, and bespoke agentic RAG infrastructure.
We present a simpler alternative: a portable skill consisting of a natural-language instruction, lightweight tools (a retrieval API, format-checking scripts), and a corpus enriched with an LLM-generated navigation layer, which is a structured "Wikipedia-style" index over the underlying documents. This agentic RAG approach is straightforward to implement (1-2 engineer days), portable across capable agentic harnesses (e.g., Claude Code), and performs strongly on the challenging task of CS resolution workflow generation, achieving 99.2% procedural equivalence to human-approved ground truth and 83.3% evidence sufficiency. Our analysis yields a concrete deployment insight: a skill-based agentic RAG implementation over a corpus augmented with a lightweight navigation layer can substitute for complex RAG infrastructure, shifting the primary maintenance burden from model artifacts to text and data curation.
We present a simpler alternative: a portable skill consisting of a natural-language instruction, lightweight tools (a retrieval API, format-checking scripts), and a corpus enriched with an LLM-generated navigation layer, which is a structured "Wikipedia-style" index over the underlying documents. This agentic RAG approach is straightforward to implement (1-2 engineer days), portable across capable agentic harnesses (e.g., Claude Code), and performs strongly on the challenging task of CS resolution workflow generation, achieving 99.2% procedural equivalence to human-approved ground truth and 83.3% evidence sufficiency. Our analysis yields a concrete deployment insight: a skill-based agentic RAG implementation over a corpus augmented with a lightweight navigation layer can substitute for complex RAG infrastructure, shifting the primary maintenance burden from model artifacts to text and data curation.
From Monolithic Blending to Agentic Orchestration: Dynamic Response for Conversational Assistants at Scale
Cen Zhao | Peng Wang | Chuan Shi | Yufeng Zhang | Ying Lyu | Wanmeng Ren | Robert Xue | Claire Cheng | Yashar Mehdad
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Cen Zhao | Peng Wang | Chuan Shi | Yufeng Zhang | Ying Lyu | Wanmeng Ren | Robert Xue | Claire Cheng | Yashar Mehdad
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Conversational assistants can blend retrieval, action selection, escalation, and wording in one model path, or separate those roles. We report a production migration of a conversational assistant for customer support at a large accommodation marketplace (millions of conversations per month, 11 languages, 10-second P90). Dynamic Response (DR) replaces a single Qwen3-235B-A22B blended responder with a bounded ReAct orchestrator over typed tools plus a smaller generator that writes from a backend-validated context contract. Because the migration also changed prompts, alignment, and serving, we attribute each effect to its cause and claim as architecture effects only those measured on identical replayed turns: typed entity selection moves the reservation selector to a precision-first operating point (precision 8.3% to 89.1% at recall 75.2% to 67.3%), and typed action IDs with a membership check remove observed structured-action hallucination (2.14% to 0.0%). A low-ramp A/B test reproduces the replay escalation reductions: hard-escalation responses fall 5.60% to 3.08% and soft-escalation responses 9.56% to 2.49% while production handoff volume holds roughly steady, and self-solve is directional (+5.1 points, 95% CI [-2, +12]). Serving optimizations cut orchestrator P90 from 3.87s to 2.24s on a GPU footprint reduced by roughly one-third, and self-hosting reduces estimated annual model-serving cost by more than an order of magnitude.
2025
Incremental Summarization for Customer Support via Progressive Note-Taking and Agent Feedback
Yisha Wu | Cen Zhao | Yuanpei Cao | Xiaoqing Xu | Yashar Mehdad | Mindy Ji | Claire Na Cheng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Yisha Wu | Cen Zhao | Yuanpei Cao | Xiaoqing Xu | Yashar Mehdad | Mindy Ji | Claire Na Cheng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
We introduce an incremental summarization system for customer support agents that intelligently determines when to generate concise bullet notes during conversations, reducing agents’ cognitive load and redundant review. Our approach combines a fine-tuned Mixtral-8×7B model for continuous note generation with a DeBERTa-based classifier to filter trivial content. Agent edits refine the online notes generation and regularly inform offline model retraining, closing the agent edits feedback loop. Deployed in production, our system achieved a 3% reduction in case handling time compared to bulk summarization (with reductions of up to 9% in highly complex cases), alongside high agent satisfaction ratings from surveys. These results demonstrate that incremental summarization with continuous feedback effectively enhances summary quality and agent productivity at scale.
Agent-in-the-Loop: A Data Flywheel for Continuous Improvement in LLM-based Customer Support
Cen Zhao | Tiantian Zhang | Hanchen Su | Yufeng Zhang | Shaowei Su | Mingzhi Xu | Yu Liu | Wei Han | Jeremy Werner | Claire Na Cheng | Yashar Mehdad
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Cen Zhao | Tiantian Zhang | Hanchen Su | Yufeng Zhang | Shaowei Su | Mingzhi Xu | Yu Liu | Wei Han | Jeremy Werner | Claire Na Cheng | Yashar Mehdad
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
We introduce an Agent-in-the-Loop (AITL) framework that implements a continuous data flywheel for iteratively improving an LLM-based customer support system. Unlike standard offline approaches that rely on batch annotations, AITL integrates four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations: (1) pairwise response preferences, (2) agent adoption and rationales, (3) knowledge relevance checks, and (4) identification of missing knowledge. These feedback signals seamlessly feed back into models’ updates, reducing retraining cycles from months to weeks. Our production pilot involving US-based customer support agents demonstrated significant improvements in retrieval accuracy (+11.7% recall@75, +14.8% precision@8), generation quality (+8.4% helpfulness) and agent adoption rates (+4.5%). These results underscore the effectiveness of embedding human feedback loops directly into operational workflows to continuously refine LLM-based customer support system.