RAILS: Retrieval-Augmented Incremental LLM Clustering at Scale
Armin Oliya, Aleksandra Sawczuk, Radosław Białobrzeski
Abstract
Using a Large Language Model (LLM) as the clusterer at production scale is hard: prompts cannot hold the entire label space, and per-document serial processing does not deliver the throughput real workloads require. We present RAILS, a retrieval-augmented incremental LLM clusterer that turns clustering into a simple loop over a growing label pool and scales through document batching with bounded concurrency. On six public benchmarks RAILS exceeds the strongest prior LLM-clustering method on average, lifting accuracy from 51.2% to 59.3%, NMI from 67.2% to 74.8%, and ARI from 45.4% to 54.7%. We further report production-deployment evidence from a SaaS ticket-topic-discovery pipeline, where RAILS has replaced a traditional HDBSCAN stage with higher clustering quality, transparent prompt-driven control, and stateful incremental operation.