Fatemeh Sheikholeslami


2025

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Auto prompting without training labels: An LLM cascade for product quality assessment in e-commerce catalogs
Soham Satyadharma | Fatemeh Sheikholeslami | Swati Kaul | Aziz Umit Batur | Suleiman A. Khan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

We introduce a novel, training free cascade for auto-prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) to assess product quality in e-commerce. Our system requires no training labels or model fine-tuning, instead automatically generating and refining prompts for evaluating attribute quality across tens of thousands of product category–attribute pairs. Starting from a seed of human-crafted prompts, the cascade progressively optimizes instructions to meet catalog-specific requirements. This approach bridges the gap between general language understanding and domain-specific knowledge at scale in complex industrial catalogs. Our extensive empirical evaluations shows the auto-prompt cascade improves precision and recall by 8–10% over traditional chain-of-thought prompting. Notably, it achieves these gains while reducing domain expert effort from 5.1 hours to 3 minutes per attribute - a 99% reduction. Additionally, the cascade generalizes effectively across five languages and multiple quality assessment tasks, consistently maintaining performance gains.

2023

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Scalable and Safe Remediation of Defective Actions in Self-Learning Conversational Systems
Sarthak Ahuja | Mohammad Kachuee | Fatemeh Sheikholeslami | Weiqing Liu | Jaeyoung Do
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been the driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural human-agent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale commercial settings, it is often challenging to balance between policy improvements and experience continuity on the broad spectrum of applications handled by such system. In the literature, off-policy evaluation and guard-railing on aggregate statistics has been commonly used to address this problem. In this paper, we propose method for curating and leveraging high-precision samples sourced from historical regression incident reports to validate, safe-guard, and improve policies prior to the online deployment. We conducted extensive experiments using data from a real-world conversational system and actual regression incidents. The proposed method is currently deployed in our production system to protect customers against broken experiences and enable long-term policy improvements.