Sandip Ghoshal

Jyotika Singh, Fang Tu, Miguel Ballesteros et al.

Large language models (LLMs) suffer significant performance degradation when user instructions and context are distributed over multiple conversational turns, yet multi-turn (MT) interactions dominate chat interfaces. The routine approach of appending full chat history to prompts rapidly exhausts context windows, leading to increased latency, higher computational costs, and diminishing returns as conversations extend. We introduce MT-OSC, a One-off Sequential Condensation framework that efficiently and automatically condenses chat history in the background without disrupting the user experience. MT-OSC employs a Condenser Agent that uses a few-shot inference-based Condenser and a lightweight Decider to selectively retain essential information, reducing token counts by up to 72% in 10-turn dialogues. Evaluated across 13 state-of-the-art LLMs and diverse multi-turn benchmarks, MT-OSC consistently narrows the multi-turn performance gap - yielding improved or preserved accuracy across datasets while remaining robust to distractors and irrelevant turns. Our results establish MT-OSC as a scalable solution for multi-turn chats, enabling richer context within constrained input spaces, reducing latency and operational cost, while balancing performance.

Sandip Ghoshal, Anshul Mittal, Jyotika Singh et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents augmented with external tools often struggle as number of tools grow large and become domain-specific. In such settings, ambiguous tool descriptions and under-specified agent instructions frequently lead to tool mis-selection and incorrect slot/value instantiation. We hypothesize that this is due to two root causes: generic, one-size-fits-all prompts that ignore tool-specific nuances, and underspecified tool schemas that lack clear guidance on when and how to use each tool and how to format its parameters. We introduce Joint Tool-Prompt Reflective Optimization (JTPRO), a framework for improving tool-calling reliability in trace-supervised settings by iteratively using rollout-driven reflection to co-optimize global instructions and per-tool schema/argument descriptions for accurate tool selection and argument instantiation in large tool inventories. JTPRO is designed to preserve only tool-local cues needed for correct disambiguation and slot filling. We evaluate JTPRO across multi-tool benchmarks, which account for different number of tools using three metrics: Tool Selection Accuracy (TSA), Slot Filling Accuracy(SFA), and Overall Success Rate(OSR) (correct tool + correct slots + correct values). JTPRO consistently outperforms strong baselines, including CoT-style agents, and reflective prompt optimizers such as GEPA by 5%-20% (relative) on OSR. Ablations show that joint optimization of instructions and tool schemas is more effective and robust than optimizing either component in isolation.

Jyotika Singh, Fang Tu, Aziza Mirzadova et al.

Benchmarks like GSM8K are popular measures of mathematical reasoning, but leaderboard gains can overstate true capability due to memorization of fixed test sets. Most robustness variants apply surface-level perturbations (paraphrases, renamings, number swaps, distractors) that largely preserve the underlying facts, and static releases can themselves become memorization targets over time. We introduce GSM-SEM, a reusable and stochastic framework for generating semantically diverse benchmark variants with substantially higher semantic variance than prior approaches. GSM-SEM perturbs problem statements by modifying entities, attributes, and/or relationships, frequently altering underlying facts and requiring models to recompute solutions under new conditions, while constraining generation to preserve the original calculations/answer and approximate problem difficulty. GSM-SEM generates fresh variants on each run without requiring re-annotation, reducing reliance on static public benchmarks for evaluation and thereby lowering the bias of memorization. We apply GSM-SEM on GSM8K and two existing variation suites (GSM-Symbolic and GSM-Plus), producing GSM8K-SEM, GSM-Symbolic-SEM, and GSM-Plus-SEM. Evaluating 14 SOTA LLMs, we observe consistent performance drops with larger decline when semantic perturbations are coupled with symbolic/plus variations (average drop rate 28% in maximum strictness configuration of GSM-SEM). We publicly release the three SEM variants as fully human-validated datasets. Finally, to demonstrate applicability beyond GSM-style math problems, we apply GSM-SEM to additional benchmarks including BigBenchHard, LogicBench, and NLR-BIRD.