Tool-Augmented Larage Language Models (TA-LLMs) have shown promise in real-world applications, but face challenges in handling incomplete queries and out-of-scope requests. While existing approaches rely mainly on Supervised Fine-Tuning with expert trajectories, we propose DiaTool-DPO, a novel method that enhances TA-LLM’s dialogue capabilities through Direct Preference Optimization. We model TA-LLM interactions as a Markov Decision Process with 5 distinct dialogue states and categorize user queries into 3 types based on their state transition trajectories. We automatically construct paired trajectory datasets of correct and incorrect dialogue flows and introduce a specialized objective loss for dialogue control. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that DiaTool-DPO approaches GPT-4o’s performance (94.8% in information gathering, 91% in tool call rejection) with substantial improvements over baseline (44% and 9.6% respectively) while maintaining core functionality. Our approach opens new possibilities for developing TA-LLMs that can handle diverse real-world scenarios without requiring additional expert demonstrations or human labeling.

A subtle difference in context results in totally different nuances even for lexically identical words. On the other hand, two words can convey similar meanings given a homogeneous context. As a result, considering only word spelling information is not sufficient to obtain quality text representation. We propose SentenceLDA, a sentence-level topic model. We combine modern SentenceBERT and classical LDA to extend the semantic unit from word to sentence. By extending the semantic unit, we verify that SentenceLDA returns more discriminative document representation than other topic models, while maintaining LDA’s elegant probabilistic interpretability. We also verify the robustness of SentenceLDA by comparing the inference results on original and paraphrased texts. Additionally, we implement one possible application of SentenceLDA on corpus-level key opinion mining by applying SentenceLDA on an argumentative corpus, DebateSum.

We introduce a new type of problems for math word problem (MWP) solvers, named Noun-MWPs, whose answer is a non-numerical string containing a noun from the problem text. We present a novel method to empower existing MWP solvers to handle Noun-MWPs, and apply the method on Expression-Pointer Transformer (EPT). Our model, N-EPT, solves Noun-MWPs significantly better than other models, and at the same time, solves conventional MWPs as well. Solving Noun-MWPs may lead to bridging MWP solvers and traditional question-answering NLP models.