# Didact: A Cross-Domain Capability Discovery System for Defence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06942/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02320/) (2020)
- [Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08921/) (2024)
- [OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01833/) (2022)
- [A Benchmark Construction and Evaluation Framework for Specialist Domains: Case Study on Defense-related Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17943/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Policymakers in defence and defence-aligned sectors must monitor rapidly evolving research alongside sector priorities relevant to operational and strategic needs. In practice, these sources are fragmented across heterogeneous formats, disjoint repositories, and siloed update streams, making capability discovery slow and difficult to audit. We present Didact, a prototype that integrates publicly available defence reports and policy documents from Australia with a purpose-built knowledge graph derived from Australian research publications. Didact provides natural language conversations for policy-oriented workflows, and leverages a composite retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. A key feature of Didact is an interactive Evidence Rail that visualises retrieved evidence and source relationships. Our evaluation of the output quality and runtime of Didact highlights its utility. While Didact has been co-developed as an academia-industry project for the Australian context, it is adaptable to other domains where knowledge is similarly fragmented. A demonstration video is available here: