Corpus2Skill: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAG

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM responses in external evidence but treats the model as a passive consumer of search results, with no view of how the corpus is organized or what it has not yet seen. We present Corpus2Skill, a system-level retrieval architecture for bounded, structurally coherent corpora such as enterprise knowledge bases: an offline compiler distills the corpus into a hierarchical skill directory, and at serve time an LLM agent navigates it, drilling from a bird's-eye view through progressively finer summaries down to documents and backtracking when a branch is unproductive. On an enterprise customer-support benchmark, Corpus2Skill improves both answer quality and grounding over single-shot dense, hybrid, hierarchical-retrieval, and agentic RAG baselines at a moderate cost tradeoff, and the lead persists under encoder-matched controls and paired significance tests. An eleven-dataset study shows that corpus navigation is not a universal replacement for retrieval: it significantly wins on five datasets, ties on three, and loses on three. It helps on single-domain corpora with a recoverable topical taxonomy, but flat retrieval remains preferable on open-domain factoid pools or homogeneous-tabular corpora that defeat top-level clustering. We characterize this scope distinction as a design guideline for knowledge-grounded systems. Code is available at https://github.com/dukesun99/Corpus2Skill.

Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Findings