Fahad Shah
2026
JTPRO: A Joint Tool–Prompt Reflective Optimization Framework for Language Agents
Sandip Ghoshal | Anshul Mittal | Jyotika Singh | Miguel Ballesteros | Weiyi Sun | Fang Tu | Shailender Singh | Yassine Benajiba | Fahad Shah | Sujeeth Bharadwaj | Sujith Ravi | Dan Roth
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Sandip Ghoshal | Anshul Mittal | Jyotika Singh | Miguel Ballesteros | Weiyi Sun | Fang Tu | Shailender Singh | Yassine Benajiba | Fahad Shah | Sujeeth Bharadwaj | Sujith Ravi | Dan Roth
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
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.
ToolScope: Enhancing LLM Agent Tool Use through Tool Merging and Context-Aware Filtering
Marianne Menglin Liu | Daniel Garcia | Fjona Parllaku | Vikas Upadhyay | Fahad Shah | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Marianne Menglin Liu | Daniel Garcia | Fjona Parllaku | Vikas Upadhyay | Fahad Shah | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language model (LLM) agents rely on external tools to solve complex tasks, but real-world toolsets often contain redundant tools with overlapping names and descriptions, introducing ambiguity and reducing selection accuracy. LLMs also face strict input context limits, preventing efficient consideration of large toolsets. To address these challenges, we propose ToolScope, which includes: (1) ToolScopeMerger with Auto-Correction to automatically audit and fix tool merges, reducing redundancy, and (2) ToolScopeRetriever to rank and select only the most relevant tools for each query, compressing toolsets to fit within context limits without sacrificing accuracy. Evaluations on three state-of-the-art LLMs and three open-source tool-use benchmarks show gains of 8.38% to 38.6% in tool selection accuracy, demonstrating ToolScope’s effectiveness in enhancing LLM tool use.
2025
FlexDoc: Parameterized Sampling for Diverse Multilingual Synthetic Documents for Training Document Understanding Models
Karan Dua | Hitesh Laxmichand Patel | Puneet Mittal | Ranjeet Gupta | Amit Agarwal | Praneet Pabolu | Srikant Panda | Hansa Meghwani | Graham Horwood | Fahad Shah
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Karan Dua | Hitesh Laxmichand Patel | Puneet Mittal | Ranjeet Gupta | Amit Agarwal | Praneet Pabolu | Srikant Panda | Hansa Meghwani | Graham Horwood | Fahad Shah
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Developing document understanding models at enterprise scale requires large, diverse, and well-annotated datasets spanning a wide range of document types. However, collecting such data is prohibitively expensive due to privacy constraints, legal restrictions, and the sheer volume of manual annotation needed - costs that can scale into millions of dollars. We introduce FlexDoc, a scalable synthetic data generation framework that combines Stochastic Schemas and Parameterized Sampling to produce realistic, multilingual semi-structured documents with rich annotations. By probabilistically modeling layout patterns, visual structure, and content variability, FlexDoc enables the controlled generation of diverse document variants at scale. Experiments on Key Information Extraction (KIE) tasks demonstrate that FlexDoc-generated data improves the absolute F1 Score by up to 11% when used to augment real datasets, while reducing annotation effort by over 90% compared to traditional hard-template methods. The solution is in active deployment, where it has accelerated the development of enterprise-grade document understanding models while significantly reducing data acquisition and annotation costs.