Bian Que: An Agentic Framework with Flexible Skill Arrangement for Online System Operations

arXiv cs.AI / 4/30/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces Bian Que, an agentic framework aimed at reducing the heavy human workload of operating large-scale online systems (search, recommendation, advertising) by improving how agents orchestrate data and operational knowledge.
  • It argues the core deployment bottleneck for LLM agents in O&M is orchestration (event-to-(metrics/logs/change data, handbook/practitioner knowledge) mapping), since indiscriminate signal feeding leads to dilution and hallucinations.
  • Bian Que provides a unified operational paradigm that abstracts O&M into three canonical patterns: release interception, proactive inspection, and alert root-cause analysis.
  • It uses “Flexible Skill Arrangement,” where Skills declare which specific data and knowledge to retrieve per business-module context and can be generated/updated by LLMs or refined via natural-language instructions from on-call engineers.
  • In experiments on KuaiShou’s e-commerce search engine, the system reduced alert volume by 75%, improved root-cause analysis accuracy to 80%, cut mean time to resolution by over 50%, and achieved a 99.0% offline evaluation pass rate, with code released on GitHub.

Abstract

Operating and maintaining (O&M) large-scale online engine systems (search, recommendation, advertising) demands substantial human effort for release monitoring, alert response, and root cause analysis. While LLM-based agents are a natural fit for these tasks, the deployment bottleneck is not reasoning capability but orchestration: selecting, for each operational event, the relevant data (metrics, logs, change events) and the applicable operational knowledge (handbook rules and practitioner experience). Feeding all signals indiscriminately causes dilution and hallucination, while manually curating the event-to-(data, knowledge) mapping is intractable under dozens of daily releases. We present Bian Que, an agentic framework with three contributions: (i) a \emph{unified operational paradigm} abstracting day-to-day O&M into three canonical patterns: release interception, proactive inspection, and alert root cause analysis; (ii) \emph{Flexible Skill Arrangement}, where each Skill specifies which data and knowledge to retrieve for a given business-module context and can be automatically generated and updated by LLMs or iteratively refined through natural-language instructions from on-call engineers; (iii) a \emph{unified self-evolving mechanism} in which one correction signal drives two parallel pathways, case-memory-to-knowledge distillation and targeted Skill refinement. Deployed on the e-commerce search engine of KuaiShou, the major short-video platform in China, Bian Que reduces alert volume by 75%, achieves 80% root-cause analysis accuracy, and cuts mean time to resolution by over 50%. Our framework achieves 99.0% pass rate on offline evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/benchen4395/BianQue_Assistant.