Paul Cayet

Cong Duy Vu Hoang, Gioacchino Tangari, Clemence Lanfranchi et al.

The growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in business applications has amplified interest in Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, in which there is competing demand for high performance and efficiency. Domain- and customer-specific requirements further complicate the problem. To address this conundrum, we introduce Distill-C, a distilled customization framework tailored for NL2SQL tasks. Distill-C utilizes large teacher LLMs to produce high-quality synthetic data through a robust and scalable pipeline. Finetuning smaller and open-source LLMs on this synthesized data enables them to rival or outperform teacher models an order of magnitude larger. Evaluated on multiple challenging benchmarks, Distill-C achieves an average improvement of 36% in execution accuracy compared to the base models from three distinct LLM families. Additionally, on three internal customer benchmarks, Distill-C demonstrates a 22.6% performance improvement over the base models. Our results demonstrate that Distill-C is an effective, high-performing and generalizable approach for deploying lightweight yet powerful NL2SQL models, delivering exceptional accuracies while maintaining low computational cost.

Soufiane Amini, Yassine Benajiba, Cesare Bernardis et al. · ibm-research

The proliferation of agent frameworks has led to fragmentation in how agents are defined, executed, and evaluated. Existing systems differ in their abstractions, data flow semantics, and tool integrations, making it difficult to share or reproduce workflows. We introduce Open Agent Specification (Agent Spec), a declarative language that defines AI agents and agentic workflows in a way that is compatible across frameworks, promoting reusability, portability and interoperability of AI agents. Agent Spec defines a common set of components, control and data flow semantics, and schemas that allow an agent to be defined once and executed across different runtimes. Agent Spec also introduces a standardized Evaluation harness to assess agent behavior and agentic workflows across runtimes - analogous to how HELM and related harnesses standardized LLM evaluation - so that performance, robustness, and efficiency can be compared consistently across frameworks. We demonstrate this using four distinct runtimes (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and WayFlow) evaluated over three different benchmarks (SimpleQA Verified, $τ^2$-Bench and BIRD-SQL). We provide accompanying toolsets: a Python SDK (PyAgentSpec), a reference runtime (WayFlow), and adapters for popular frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI). Agent Spec bridges the gap between model-centric and agent-centric standardization & evaluation, laying the groundwork for reliable, reusable, and portable agentic systems.