Vanessa Lama


2026

High-Risk Property (HRP) classification is critical at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sites, where inventories include sensitive and often dual-use equipment. Compliance must track evolving rules designated by various export control policies to make transparent and auditable decisions. Traditional expert-only workflows are time-consuming, backlog-prone, and struggle to keep pace with shifting regulatory boundaries. We propose ORCHID, a modular agentic framework for HRP classification that pairs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with human oversight to produce policy based outputs that can be audited. Small cooperating agents—retrieval, description refiner, classifier, validator, and feedback logger—coordinate via agent-to-agent messaging and invoke tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for model-agnostic on-premise operation. The interface follows an "Item to Evidence to Decision" loop with step-by-step reasoning, on-policy citations, and append-only audit bundles (run-cards, prompts, evidence). In preliminary tests on real HRP cases, ORCHID improves accuracy and traceability over a non-agentic baseline while deferring uncertain items to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The demonstration shows single item submission, grounded citations, SME feedback capture, and exportable audit artifacts—illustrating a practical path to trustworthy LLM assistance in sensitive DOE compliance workflows.

2024

Theorem proving presents a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the requirement for formal proofs to be rigorously checked by proof assistants, such as Lean, eliminating any margin for error or hallucination. While existing LLM-based theorem provers attempt to operate autonomously, they often struggle with novel and complex theorems where human insights are essential. Lean Copilot is a novel framework that integrates LLM inference into the Lean proof assistant environment. In this work, we benchmark performance of several LLMs including general and math-specific models for theorem proving using the Lean Copilot framework. Our initial investigation suggests that a general-purpose large model like LLaMa-70B still has edge over math-specific smaller models for the task under consideration. We provide useful insights into the performance of different LLMs we chose for the task.