Papers for
ai customer support teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Student conditioned reasoning traces improve question answering accuracy
Beyond the Answer: Student-Conditioned Trace Construction for Reasoning Distillation
Abstract: A reasoning trace can accompany a correct answer without providing effective supervision for a particular student. We study how to construct traces that improve learning beyond answer-only supervision by considering both their intermediate content and their accessibility to the target learner. We introduce ReDiST, a student-conditioned trace-construction and distillation framework for evidence-rich reasoning. Starting from the student's own attempts, ReDiST revises answer-correct drafts against the supplied evidence and repairs unsuccessful drafts with additional guidance from the verified answer. A frozen student-matched reader screens and ranks original and edited candidates using answer recovery and verified-answer probability, given the question, evidence, and candidate trace. We distill the selected targets while balancing trace and final-answer supervision with an auxiliary answer loss. Construction and selection occur offline, and inference uses only the distilled student. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks show that ReDiST can improve both source-task and cross-benchmark performance over answer-only, original-trace, and the evaluated trace-selection and rewriting baselines. Across supervision recipes, performance rankings can differ between source and transfer benchmarks, highlighting the importance of evaluating trace teaching utility across distributions.
Latency aware multitask learning optimizes multi agent workflows
Optimize Once, Execute Fast: Latency-Aware Multi-Agent Workflow Learning for Recurrent Queries
Abstract: Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-based MAS) have shown remarkable success in solving complex tasks by coordinating specialized agents through multi-step workflows. To overcome the high cost and specificity of manually designed workflows, recent research has shifted toward learning them automatically. However, a key limitation remains: while agent calls introduce significant latency due to model inference time and service congestion, most automated methods optimize solely for downstream performance, ignoring execution time (makespan). This issue is amplified when workflows are reused across recurring queries, making latency accumulate over time. This limits deployment in recurrent applications such as AI customer support and AI cloud troubleshooting, where users expect fast responses. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new problem, termed latency-aware workflow generation, where the objective is to minimize workflow makespan while aiming to retain downstream performance. We propose LAWA (Latency-Aware Workflow optimizAtion), a novel framework that reduces makespan via theoretically grounded graph edits targeting critical-path bottlenecks. By unifying a graph generator with this graph-editing procedure, LAWA supports both de novo workflow generation and refinement of existing ones. Empirical results across seven benchmarks demonstrate that LAWA significantly reduces makespan while achieving competitive task performance, supporting efficient reuse of multi-agent workflows for recurrent queries.