The resurgence of autonomous agents built using large language models (LLMs) to solve complex real-world tasks has brought increased focus on LLMs’ fundamental ability of tool or function calling. At the core of these agents, an LLM must plan, execute, and respond using external tools, APIs, and custom functions. Research on tool calling has gathered momentum, but evaluation benchmarks and datasets representing the complexity of the tasks have lagged behind. In this work, we focus on one such complexity, nested sequencing, with the goal of extending existing benchmarks and evaluation. Specifically, we present NESTFUL, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e., sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. NESTFUL contains 1800+ nested sequences where all the function calls are executable. Experimental results on a variety of models show that the best-performing model (GPT-4o) achieves a full sequence match accuracy of 28% and a win-rate of 60%, necessitating a large scope for improvement in the nested sequencing aspect of function calling. Our analysis of these results provides possible future research directions for the community, in addition to a benchmark to track progress.

There is a growing need for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively use tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to plan and complete tasks. As such, there is tremendous interest in methods that can acquire sufficient quantities of train and test data that involve calls to tools / APIs. Two lines of research have emerged as the predominant strategies for addressing this challenge. The first has focused on synthetic data generation techniques, while the second has involved curating task-adjacent datasets which can be transformed into API / Tool-based tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task of identifying, curating, and transforming existing datasets and, in turn, introduce API-BLEND, a large corpora for training and systematic testing of tool-augmented LLMs. The datasets mimic real-world scenarios involving API-tasks such as API / tool detection, slot filling, and sequencing of the detected APIs. We demonstrate the utility of the API-BLEND dataset for both training and benchmarking purposes.

An emergent research trend explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as the backbone of agentic systems (e.g., SWE-Bench, Agent-Bench). To fulfill LLMs’ potential as autonomous agents, they must be able to identify, call, and interact with a variety of external tools and application program interfaces (APIs). This capability of LLMs, commonly termed function calling, leads to a myriad of advantages such as access to current and domain-specific information in databases and the outsourcing of tasks that can be reliably performed by tools. In this work, we introduce Granite-20B-FunctionCalling, a model trained using a multi-task training approach on seven fundamental tasks encompassed in function calling. Our comprehensive evaluation on multiple out-of-domain datasets, which compares Granite-20B-FunctionCalling to more than 15 other best proprietary and open models, shows that Granite-20B-FunctionCalling has better generalizability on multiple tasks across seven different evaluation benchmarks. Moreover, Granite-20B-FunctionCalling shows the best performance among all open models and ranks among the top on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL).

Nearly all general-purpose neural semantic parsers generate logical forms in a strictly top-down autoregressive fashion. Though such systems have achieved impressive results across a variety of datasets and domains, recent works have called into question whether they are ultimately limited in their ability to compositionally generalize. In this work, we approach semantic parsing from, quite literally, the opposite direction; that is, we introduce a neural semantic parsing generation method that constructs logical forms from the bottom up, beginning from the logical form’s leaves. The system we introduce is lazy in that it incrementally builds up a set of potential semantic parses, but only expands and processes the most promising candidate parses at each generation step. Such a parsimonious expansion scheme allows the system to maintain an arbitrarily large set of parse hypotheses that are never realized and thus incur minimal computational overhead. We evaluate our approach on compositional generalization; specifically, on the challenging CFQ dataset and two other Text-to-SQL datasets where we show that our novel, bottom-up semantic parsing technique outperforms general-purpose semantic parsers while also being competitive with semantic parsers that have been tailored to each task.

With the growing interest in large language models, the need for evaluating the quality of machine text compared to reference (typically human-generated) text has become focal attention. Most recent works focus either on task-specific evaluation metrics or study the properties of machine-generated text captured by the existing metrics. In this work, we propose a new evaluation scheme to model human judgments in 7 NLP tasks, based on the fine-grained mismatches between a pair of texts. Inspired by the recent efforts in several NLP tasks for fine-grained evaluation, we introduce a set of 13 mismatch error types such as spatial/geographic errors, entity errors, etc, to guide the model for better prediction of human judgments. We propose a neural framework for evaluating machine texts that uses these mismatch error types as auxiliary tasks and re-purposes the existing single-number evaluation metrics as additional scalar features, in addition to textual features extracted from the machine and reference texts. Our experiments reveal key insights about the existing metrics via the mismatch errors. We show that the mismatch errors between the sentence pairs on the held-out datasets from 7 NLP tasks align well with the human evaluation.

We present a neuro-symbolic approach to self-learn rules that serve as interpretable knowledge to perform relation linking in knowledge base question answering systems. These rules define natural language text predicates as a weighted mixture of knowledge base paths. The weights learned during training effectively serve the mapping needed to perform relation linking. We use popular masked training strategy to self-learn the rules. A key distinguishing aspect of our work is that the masked training operate over logical forms of the sentence instead of their natural language text form. This offers opportunity to extract extended context information from the structured knowledge source and use that to build robust and human readable rules. We evaluate accuracy and usefulness of such learned rules by utilizing them for prediction of missing kinship relation in CLUTRR dataset and relation linking in a KBQA system using SWQ-WD dataset. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach - its generalizability, interpretability and ability to achieve an average performance gain of 17% on CLUTRR dataset.

Abstractive summarization models often produce factually inconsistent summaries that are not supported by the original article. Recently, a number of fact-consistent evaluation techniques have been proposed to address this issue; however, a detailed analysis of how these metrics agree with one another has yet to be conducted. In this paper, we present X-FACTOR, a cross-evaluation of three high-performing fact-aware abstractive summarization methods. First, we show that summarization models are often fine-tuned on datasets that contain factually inconsistent summaries and propose a fact-aware filtering mechanism that improves the quality of training data and, consequently, the factuality of these models. Second, we propose a corrector module that can be used to improve the factual consistency of generated summaries. Third, we present a re-ranking technique that samples summary instances from the output distribution of a summarization model and re-ranks the sampled instances based on their factuality. Finally, we provide a detailed cross-metric agreement analysis that shows how tuning a model to output summaries based on a particular factuality metric influences factuality as determined by the other metrics. Our goal in this work is to facilitate research that improves the factuality and faithfulness of abstractive summarization models.