Summarization of multi-party dialogues is a critical capability in industry, enhancing knowledge transfer and operational effectiveness across many domains. However, automatically generating high-quality summaries is challenging, as the ideal summary must satisfy a set of complex, multi-faceted requirements. While summarization has received immense attention in research, prior work has primarily utilized static datasets and benchmarks, a condition rare in practical scenarios where requirements inevitably evolve. In this work, we present an industry case study on developing an agentic system to summarize multi-party interactions. We share practical insights spanning the full development lifecycle to guide practitioners in building reliable, adaptable summarization systems, as well as to inform future research, covering: 1) robust methods for evaluation despite evolving requirements and task subjectivity, 2) component-wise optimization enabled by the task decomposition inherent in an agentic architecture, 3) the impact of upstream data bottlenecks, and 4) the realities of vendor lock-in due to the poor transferability of LLM prompts.

Large Language Model (LLM) routers dynamically select optimal models for given inputs. Existing approaches typically assume access to ground-truth labeled data, which is often unavailable in practice, especially when user request distributions are heterogeneous and unknown. We introduce Routing with Generated Data (RGD), a challenging setting in which routers are trained exclusively on generated queries and answers produced from high-level task descriptions by generator LLMs. We evaluate query-answer routers (using both queries and labels) and query-only routers across four diverse benchmarks and 12 models, finding that query-answer routers degrade faster than query-only routers as generator quality decreases. Our analysis reveals two crucial characteristics of effective generators: they must accurately respond to their own questions, and their questions must produce sufficient performance differentiation among the model pool. We then show how filtering for these characteristics can improve the quality of generated data. We further propose CASCAL, a novel query-only router that estimates model correctness through consensus voting and identifies model-specific skill niches via hierarchical clustering. CASCAL is substantially more robust to generator quality, outperforming the best query-answer router by 4.6% absolute accuracy when trained on weak generator data.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural, visually grounded language understanding. This benchmark includes a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects, spanning 9 language families and featuring over 1 million data points, making it the largest multicultural VQA benchmark to date. It includes tasks for identifying dish names and their origins. We provide evaluation datasets in two sizes (12k and 60k instances) alongside a training dataset (1 million instances). Our findings show that while VLMs perform better with correct location context, they struggle with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. To support future research, we release a knowledge base with annotated food entries and images along with the VQA data.