SHERLOCK: Towards Dynamic Knowledge Adaptation in LLM-enhanced E-commerce Risk Management

Effective e-commerce risk management requires in-depth case investigations to identify emerging fraud patterns in highly adversarial environments. However, manual investigation typically requires analyzing the associations and couplings among multi-source heterogeneous data, a labor-intensive process that limits efficiency. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in automating these analyses, their deployment is hindered by the complexity of risk scenarios and the sparsity of long-tail domain knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose Sherlock, a framework that integrates structured domain knowledge with LLM-based reasoning through three core modules. First, we construct a domain Knowledge Base (KB) by distilling structured expertise from heterogeneous knowledge sources. Second, we design a two-stage retrieval-augmented generation strategy tailored for case investigation, which combines input contextual augmentation with a Reflect & Refine module to fully leverage the KB for improved analysis quality. Finally, we develop an integrated platform for operations and annotation to drive a self-evolving data flywheel. By combining real-time hotfixes through KB updates with periodic logic alignment via post-training, we facilitate continuous system evolution to counteract adversarial drifts. Online A/B tests at JD dot com demonstrate that Sherlock achieves an 82% Expert Acceptance Rate (EAR) and a 386.7% increase in daily investigation throughput. An additional 90-day evaluation shows that the flywheel successfully recovers from performance decay caused by changing tactics twice, raising the EAR ceiling by around 3.5% through autonomous model updates.