ORCHID: Orchestrated Retrieval-Augmented Classification with Human-in-the-Loop Intelligent Decision-Making for High-Risk Property
This addresses compliance challenges for DOE sites dealing with sensitive equipment, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing RAG and agentic approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of High-Risk Property classification at U.S. Department of Energy sites by developing ORCHID, a modular agentic system that pairs retrieval-augmented generation with human oversight. In preliminary tests on real cases, it improves accuracy and traceability over a non-agentic baseline while deferring uncertain items to experts.
High-Risk Property (HRP) classification is critical at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sites, where inventories include sensitive and often dual-use equipment. Compliance must track evolving rules designated by various export control policies to make transparent and auditable decisions. Traditional expert-only workflows are time-consuming, backlog-prone, and struggle to keep pace with shifting regulatory boundaries. We demo ORCHID, a modular agentic system for HRP classification that pairs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with human oversight to produce policy-based outputs that can be audited. Small cooperating agents, retrieval, description refiner, classifier, validator, and feedback logger, coordinate via agent-to-agent messaging and invoke tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for model-agnostic on-premise operation. The interface follows an Item to Evidence to Decision loop with step-by-step reasoning, on-policy citations, and append-only audit bundles (run-cards, prompts, evidence). In preliminary tests on real HRP cases, ORCHID improves accuracy and traceability over a non-agentic baseline while deferring uncertain items to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The demonstration shows single item submission, grounded citations, SME feedback capture, and exportable audit artifacts, illustrating a practical path to trustworthy LLM assistance in sensitive DOE compliance workflows.