Arnav Singhvi

Omar Khattab, Arnav Singhvi, Paridhi Maheshwari et al.

The ML community is rapidly exploring techniques for prompting language models (LMs) and for stacking them into pipelines that solve complex tasks. Unfortunately, existing LM pipelines are typically implemented using hard-coded "prompt templates", i.e. lengthy strings discovered via trial and error. Toward a more systematic approach for developing and optimizing LM pipelines, we introduce DSPy, a programming model that abstracts LM pipelines as text transformation graphs, i.e. imperative computational graphs where LMs are invoked through declarative modules. DSPy modules are parameterized, meaning they can learn (by creating and collecting demonstrations) how to apply compositions of prompting, finetuning, augmentation, and reasoning techniques. We design a compiler that will optimize any DSPy pipeline to maximize a given metric. We conduct two case studies, showing that succinct DSPy programs can express and optimize sophisticated LM pipelines that reason about math word problems, tackle multi-hop retrieval, answer complex questions, and control agent loops. Within minutes of compiling, a few lines of DSPy allow GPT-3.5 and llama2-13b-chat to self-bootstrap pipelines that outperform standard few-shot prompting (generally by over 25% and 65%, respectively) and pipelines with expert-created demonstrations (by up to 5-46% and 16-40%, respectively). On top of that, DSPy programs compiled to open and relatively small LMs like 770M-parameter T5 and llama2-13b-chat are competitive with approaches that rely on expert-written prompt chains for proprietary GPT-3.5. DSPy is available at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Arnav Singhvi, Vasiliki Bikia, Asad Aali et al.

Vision-language foundation models (VLMs) show promise for diverse imaging tasks but often underperform on medical benchmarks. Prior efforts to improve performance include model finetuning, which requires large domain-specific datasets and significant compute, or manual prompt engineering, which is hard to generalize and often inaccessible to medical institutions seeking to deploy these tools. These challenges motivate interest in approaches that draw on a model's embedded knowledge while abstracting away dependence on human-designed prompts to enable scalable, weight-agnostic performance improvements. To explore this, we adapt the Declarative Self-improving Python (DSPy) framework for structured automated prompt optimization in medical vision-language systems through a comprehensive, formal evaluation. We implement prompting pipelines for five medical imaging tasks across radiology, gastroenterology, and dermatology, evaluating 10 open-source VLMs with four prompt optimization techniques. Optimized pipelines achieved a median relative improvement of 53% over zero-shot prompting baselines, with the largest gains ranging from 300% to 3,400% on tasks where zero-shot performance is low. These results highlight the substantial potential of applying automated prompt optimization to medical AI systems, demonstrating significant gains for vision-based applications requiring accurate clinical image interpretation. By reducing dependence on prompt design to elicit intended outputs, these techniques allow clinicians to focus on patient care and clinical decision-making. Furthermore, our experiments offer scalability and preserve data privacy, demonstrating performance improvement on open-source VLMs. We publicly release our evaluation pipelines to support reproducible research on specialized medical tasks, available at https://github.com/DaneshjouLab/prompt-triage-lab.

Arnav Singhvi, Manish Shetty, Shangyin Tan et al.

Chaining language model (LM) calls as composable modules is fueling a new way of programming, but ensuring LMs adhere to important constraints requires heuristic "prompt engineering". We introduce LM Assertions, a programming construct for expressing computational constraints that LMs should satisfy. We integrate our constructs into the recent DSPy programming model for LMs, and present new strategies that allow DSPy to compile programs with LM Assertions into more reliable and accurate systems. We also propose strategies to use assertions at inference time for automatic self-refinement with LMs. We report on four diverse case studies for text generation and find that LM Assertions improve not only compliance with imposed rules but also downstream task performance, passing constraints up to 164% more often and generating up to 37% more higher-quality responses. Our reference implementation of LM Assertions is integrated into DSPy at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Shangyin Tan, Lakshya A Agrawal, Arnav Singhvi et al.

Composing language models (LMs) into multi-step language programs and automatically optimizing their modular prompts is now a mainstream paradigm for building AI systems, but the tradeoffs in this space have only scarcely been studied before. We introduce LangProBe, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating the architectures and optimization strategies for language programs, with over 2000 combinations of tasks, architectures, optimizers, and choices of LMs. Using LangProBe, we are the first to study the impact of program architectures and optimizers (and their compositions together and with different models) on tradeoffs of quality and cost. We find that optimized language programs offer strong cost--quality Pareto improvement over raw calls to models, but simultaneously demonstrate that human judgment (or empirical decisions) about which compositions to pursue is still necessary for best performance. We will open source the code and evaluation data for LangProBe.

Asad Aali, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Vasiliki Bikia et al.

As language models (LMs) are increasingly adopted across domains, high-quality benchmarking frameworks that accurately estimate performance are essential for guiding deployment decisions. While frameworks such as Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) enable broad evaluation across tasks, they often rely on fixed prompts that fail to generalize across LMs, yielding unrepresentative performance estimates. Unless we approximate each LM's ceiling (maximum achievable via changes to the prompt), we risk underestimating performance. Declarative prompting frameworks, such as DSPy, offer a scalable alternative to manual prompt engineering by crafting structured prompts that can be optimized per task. However, such frameworks have not been systematically evaluated across established benchmarks. We present a reproducible DSPy+HELM framework that introduces structured prompting methods which elicit reasoning, enabling more accurate LM benchmarking. Using four prompting methods, we evaluate four frontier LMs across seven benchmarks (general/medical domain) against existing HELM baseline scores. We find that without structured prompting: (i) HELM underestimates LM performance (by 4% average), (ii) performance estimates vary more across benchmarks ($+$2% standard deviation), (iii) performance gaps are misrepresented (leaderboard rankings flip on 3/7 benchmarks), and (iv) introducing chain-of-thought reduces LM sensitivity to prompt design (smaller $Δ$ across prompts). To our knowledge, this is the first benchmarking study to systematically integrate structured prompting into an established evaluation framework, demonstrating how scalable performance-ceiling approximation yields more robust, decision-useful benchmarks. We open-source (i) DSPy+HELM Integration (https://github.com/stanford-crfm/helm/pull/3893) and (ii) Prompt Optimization Pipeline (https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/dspy-helm).

Asad Aali, Vasiliki Bikia, Maya Varma et al. · stanford

With the growing use of language models (LMs) in clinical environments, there is an immediate need to evaluate the accuracy and safety of LM-generated medical text. Currently, such evaluation relies solely on manual physician review. However, detecting errors in LM-generated text is challenging because 1) manual review is costly and 2) expert-composed reference outputs are often unavailable in real-world settings. While the "LM-as-judge" paradigm (a LM evaluating another LM) offers scalable evaluation, even frontier LMs can miss subtle but clinically significant errors. To address these challenges, we propose MedVAL, a novel, self-supervised, data-efficient distillation method that leverages synthetic data to train evaluator LMs to assess whether LM-generated medical outputs are factually consistent with inputs, without requiring physician labels or reference outputs. To evaluate LM performance, we introduce MedVAL-Bench, a dataset of 840 physician-annotated outputs across 6 diverse medical tasks capturing real-world challenges. Across 10 state-of-the-art LMs spanning open-source and proprietary models, MedVAL distillation significantly improves (p < 0.001) alignment with physicians across seen and unseen tasks, increasing average F1 scores from 66% to 83%. Despite strong baseline performance, MedVAL improves the best-performing proprietary LM (GPT-4o) by 8% without training on physician-labeled data, demonstrating a performance statistically non-inferior to a single human expert (p < 0.001). To support a scalable, risk-aware pathway towards clinical integration, we open-source: 1) Codebase (https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/MedVAL), 2) MedVAL-Bench (https://huggingface.co/datasets/stanfordmimi/MedVAL-Bench), 3) MedVAL-4B (https://huggingface.co/stanfordmimi/MedVAL-4B). Our benchmark provides evidence of LMs approaching expert-level ability in validating AI-generated medical text.

Lakshya A Agrawal, Shangyin Tan, Dilara Soylu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to downstream tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which often require thousands of rollouts to learn new tasks. We argue that the interpretable nature of language can often provide a much richer learning medium for LLMs, compared with policy gradients derived from sparse, scalar rewards. To test this, we introduce GEPA (Genetic-Pareto), a prompt optimizer that thoroughly incorporates natural language reflection to learn high-level rules from trial and error. Given any AI system containing one or more LLM prompts, GEPA samples system-level trajectories (e.g., reasoning, tool calls, and tool outputs) and reflects on them in natural language to diagnose problems, propose and test prompt updates, and combine complementary lessons from the Pareto frontier of its own attempts. As a result of GEPA's design, it can often turn even just a few rollouts into a large quality gain. Across four tasks, GEPA outperforms GRPO by 10% on average and by up to 20%, while using up to 35x fewer rollouts. GEPA also outperforms the leading prompt optimizer, MIPROv2, by over 10% across two LLMs, and demonstrates promising results as an inference-time search strategy for code optimization.

Jonathan D. Chang, Andrew Drozdov, Shubham Toshniwal et al.

We present a system for training enterprise search agents via reinforcement learning that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse suite of hard-to-verify agentic search tasks. Our work makes four core contributions. First, we introduce KARLBench, a multi-capability evaluation suite spanning six distinct search regimes, including constraint-driven entity search, cross-document report synthesis, tabular numerical reasoning, exhaustive entity retrieval, procedural reasoning over technical documentation, and fact aggregation over internal enterprise notes. Second, we show that models trained across heterogeneous search behaviors generalize substantially better than those optimized for any single benchmark. Third, we develop an agentic synthesis pipeline that employs long-horizon reasoning and tool use to generate diverse, grounded, and high-quality training data, with iterative bootstrapping from increasingly capable models. Fourth, we propose a new post-training paradigm based on iterative large-batch off-policy RL that is sample efficient, robust to train-inference engine discrepancies, and naturally extends to multi-task training with out-of-distribution generalization. Compared to Claude 4.6 and GPT 5.2, KARL is Pareto-optimal on KARLBench across cost-quality and latency-quality trade-offs, including tasks that were out-of-distribution during training. With sufficient test-time compute, it surpasses the strongest closed models. These results show that tailored synthetic data in combination with multi-task reinforcement learning enables cost-efficient and high-performing knowledge agents for grounded reasoning.