Claire Na Cheng


2025

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Agent-in-the-Loop: A Data Flywheel for Continuous Improvement in LLM-based Customer Support
Cen Zhao | Tiantian Zhang | Hanchen Su | Yufeng Zhang | Shaowei Su | Mingzhi Xu | Yu Liu | Wei Han | Jeremy Werner | Claire Na Cheng | Yashar Mehdad
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

We introduce an Agent-in-the-Loop (AITL) framework that implements a continuous data flywheel for iteratively improving an LLM-based customer support system. Unlike standard offline approaches that rely on batch annotations, AITL integrates four key types of annotations directly into live customer operations: (1) pairwise response preferences, (2) agent adoption and rationales, (3) knowledge relevance checks, and (4) identification of missing knowledge. These feedback signals seamlessly feed back into models’ updates, reducing retraining cycles from months to weeks. Our production pilot involving US-based customer support agents demonstrated significant improvements in retrieval accuracy (+11.7% recall@75, +14.8% precision@8), generation quality (+8.4% helpfulness) and agent adoption rates (+4.5%). These results underscore the effectiveness of embedding human feedback loops directly into operational workflows to continuously refine LLM-based customer support system.

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Incremental Summarization for Customer Support via Progressive Note-Taking and Agent Feedback
Yisha Wu | Cen Zhao | Yuanpei Cao | Xiaoqing Xu | Yashar Mehdad | Mindy Ji | Claire Na Cheng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

We introduce an incremental summarization system for customer support agents that intelligently determines when to generate concise bullet notes during conversations, reducing agents’ cognitive load and redundant review. Our approach combines a fine-tuned Mixtral-8×7B model for continuous note generation with a DeBERTa-based classifier to filter trivial content. Agent edits refine the online notes generation and regularly inform offline model retraining, closing the agent edits feedback loop. Deployed in production, our system achieved a 3% reduction in case handling time compared to bulk summarization (with reductions of up to 9% in highly complex cases), alongside high agent satisfaction ratings from surveys. These results demonstrate that incremental summarization with continuous feedback effectively enhances summary quality and agent productivity at scale.