Ashwanth Krishnan

4papers

4 Papers

9.0AIJul 15
How Far Can Root Cause Analysis Go on Real-World Telemetry Data?

Athira Gopal, Ashwanth Krishnan

Identifying root causes in production microservice failures requires reasoning over large-scale, multimodal telemetry spanning metrics, logs, and traces, a problem that has proved resistant to both classical and LLM-based approaches. The OpenRCA dataset exemplifies these challenges: it is large-scale, multimodal, and lacks detailed domain knowledge, and yields consistently low accuracy across all existing methods. We show that classical causal discovery methods and existing LLM-based multi-agent systems fail to reliably identify root causes on this benchmark, and present a Structured Multi-Agent RCA pipeline that substantially outperforms existing LLM-based and classical baselines, supporting both domain-knowledge and knowledge-free operating modes. To diagnose where failures originate, we introduce a reverse reasoning agent that, given the correct answer, identifies which signals in the extracted anomalies support it and determines whether Stage~1 had access to those signals, classifying each failure as Reasoning Gap (evidence present but unused) or Data Ambiguity (evidence genuinely absent). This analysis reveals that the required evidence is present in the vast majority of failures: the bottleneck is not data access but the agent's ability to reason over it correctly. We further introduce an automated rule mining pipeline that systematically extracts discrimination rules from reverse reasoning reports, reducing reliance on manual knowledge curation. Across all configurations, model reasoning capability and domain knowledge are the primary constraints: stronger models embed more domain expertise, and explicit knowledge injection partially compensates for this gap. Reasoning performance remains practically bounded even when evidence extraction is perfect: scaffold engineering and better data pipelines alone cannot close this gap; progress requires improvements at the model level.

14.1AIJul 15
STOCKTAKE: Measuring the Gap Between Perception and Action in LLM Agents with a Fair Oracle

Sagar Deb, Ashwanth Krishnan

LLM agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-week decision tasks in which the state that drives cost is never directly observed. On such tasks the final cost cannot say why an agent failed: it may have misread the world, or read it correctly and still failed to act (the knowing-doing gap). Existing evaluations cannot separate these two failures; their reference policies either read privileged information the agent never sees, or are missing altogether. We introduce STOCKTAKE, a 26-week supply-chain replenishment benchmark built as a factored partially observable Markov decision process with six hidden factor processes, designed so that a fair reference policy is computable: an exact Bayes filter per factor drives a rollout policy on the identical observation stream the agent receives. Scoring each run between a symptom-blind base-stock floor (0) and this oracle (1) yields a skill score, and grading each week's written rationale yields a stated-belief detection lag and a knowing-doing rate, so state estimation and control are measured separately. On fifty seeds with curated stress profiles, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.4, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, and Grok 4.5 detect 84-88% of hidden failures, typically within a week of onset, yet span skill scores from 0.62 to -0.23: two of the four end below the symptom-blind floor while naming factors slightly faster than the two that beat it. The failure has two faces. Where stress persists, 34-43% of correctly diagnosed stress weeks still end in stockout for every model, a rate that partly reflects the severity of the weeks models notice. That rate also runs opposite to skill: the two models under the floor stock out least on diagnosed weeks, so under-response is only one face of the gap, and their traces point to the other, responses whose cost exceeds what they protect. STOCKTAKE measures both directions of that failure.

3.3AIOct 17, 2025Code
Adaptive Minds: Empowering Agents with LoRA-as-Tools

Pavan C Shekar, Ashwanth Krishnan

We present Adaptive Minds, an agentic system that treats LoRA adapters as domain-specific tools. Instead of relying on a single fine-tuned model or rigid rule-based routing, our approach empowers the base LLM itself to act as a semantic router analyzing each query and dynamically selecting the most relevant LoRA tool. This enables the agent to seamlessly switch between different domain experts on demand. By combining the flexibility of multi-agent orchestration with the efficiency of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Adaptive Minds delivers accurate, specialized responses while preserving conversational ability. The system is built with LangGraph for workflow management, supports both API and web interfaces, and is fully open source, providing a scalable and extensible foundation for domain-adaptive AI assistance.

7.3AIJun 4
ReTreVal: Reasoning Tree with Validation and Cross-Problem Memory for Large Language Models

Abhishek HS, Pavan C Shekar, Arpit Jain et al.

Every existing inference-time reasoning framework discards all failure context at problem boundaries, leaving a model solving problem 500 no wiser than it was on problem 1. We present ReTreVal (Reasoning Tree with Validation), a training-free framework that closes this gap through adaptive tree exploration with tool-augmented node refinement, typed-failure backtracking that injects categorized error context into the recovered branch, and a self-rewriting memory that accumulates and revises strategy entries across problems, enabling inference-time cross-problem learning on any fixed, unmodified LLM without fine-tuning. ReTreVal achieves 85.8% pass@1 on MATH-500 (+8.6 pp over Zero-Shot CoT, +8.6 pp over the strongest baseline Self-Refine) and 54.4% on MMLU-Pro (+15.3 pp over Self-Refine), with a 3.4:1 win-to-regression ratio confirming genuine error recovery rather than noise. These capabilities, previously requiring gradient updates, allow a 32B model to compete with much larger single-pass systems.