# Skill-Contracted Agents for Evidence-Aware Materials Literature Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20431/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 15 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Agentic RAG, agents and memory](https://mlsanity.com/rag/agentic-rag-agents-and-memory/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03214/) (2023)
- [DocFormer: End-to-End Transformer for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11539/) (2021)
- [Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14283/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10981/) (2024)
- [Growth rates of modern science: A latent piecewise growth curve approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07675/) (2020)
- [Materials science in the era of large language models: a perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06949/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Materials science literature analysis requires simultaneous attention to composition, processing, characterization, and property relationships, yet conventional retrieval-augmented generation pipelines struggle to reconcile heterogeneous tasks within a single retrieve-then-generate architecture. Here we present AlphaAgent, a skill-driven agent framework that decouples retrieval-based question answering from paper-level report generation through explicit skill contracts. A dedicated retrieval skill rewrites user requests into material-specific search intents, queries a curated index of more than 300,000 papers from the Journal Citation Reports Metallurgy and Metallurgical Engineering category, and reformulates queries when initial evidence is insufficient. A separate report-generation skill parses full-text PDFs to produce structured per-paper analytical reports and cross-paper summaries. In a blind evaluation on 40 materials-science questions, half of which required deep analytical reasoning, AlphaAgent substantially outperformed a baseline system matched for underlying model, document index, and retrieval scale, with the largest gains in mechanistic explanation and awareness of credibility boundaries. These results indicate that explicit task separation, refined retrieval intent, and evidence-aware generation improve large-language-model-based literature analysis for materials research.