Didact: AI System Helps Defence Policymakers Discover Research Capabilities Across Fragmented Sources
Researchers have developed Didact, a prototype AI system designed to help defence policymakers discover relevant capabilities across fragmented research repositories and policy documents. The system integrates Australian defence reports and policy documents with a knowledge graph built from Australian research publications, using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline and an interactive Evidence Rail for source visualisation. The work addresses a recognised gap in how defence-sector decision-makers access and audit rapidly evolving research relevant to operational and strategic needs.
Didact is a cross-domain capability discovery prototype developed as an academia-industry collaboration targeting the Australian defence context. It combines publicly available Australian defence reports and policy documents with a purpose-built knowledge graph derived from Australian research publications, enabling natural language querying suited to policy-oriented workflows. The system's core technical approach relies on a composite retrieval-augmented generation pipeline, supplemented by an interactive Evidence Rail that visualises retrieved evidence and the relationships between sources to support auditability. The authors report evaluation of both output quality and runtime performance, finding results that support the system's utility, though specific quantitative benchmarks are not detailed in the abstract. The paper is currently under review for the CIKM 2026 System Demonstration Track, meaning it has not yet undergone formal peer review. The authors note that while Didact was built for the Australian context, its architecture is intended to be adaptable to other domains where relevant knowledge is similarly fragmented across heterogeneous formats and siloed repositories.
What's missing
The abstract does not disclose specific quantitative evaluation results (e.g., precision, recall, or latency benchmarks), making it difficult to independently assess the system's claimed utility. The paper is under review and has not yet been peer-reviewed, so findings remain preliminary.
What different sources said
- arXiv cs.CLCenter
Didact: A Cross-Domain Capability Discovery System for Defence
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