Daniel Zhang
Author directory2026
Enrich-Retrieve-Rank: Scaling Capability Discovery Beyond In-Context Routing
Nazib Sorathiya | Daniel Zhang | Bardiya Akhbari
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Nazib Sorathiya | Daniel Zhang | Bardiya Akhbari
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Agent ecosystems now include thousands of MATS components (Models, Agents, Tools, and Skills), yet their discovery still relies on in-context routing. These systems read a registry (names, hints, or descriptions, as context budget permits), pick a candidate, invoke it, and retry on failure. This pattern degrades with scale, and registries are growing fast. We recast capability discovery as search over a registry by defining an offline enrichment step that turns sparse metadata into searchable profiles, and an online retrieve-then-rank pipeline that returns a ranked shortlist without invoking any candidates online. We show that from N=10 to 7,278 capabilities, in-context routing’s top-1 accuracy (Match@1) collapses (0.85 to 0.12), while retrieve-then-rank degrades more gently (0.81 to 0.39) because its reranker still ranks the right capability first 0.70-0.87 of the time once retrieval finds it. In the Nova Micro sweep, the crossover is around N=500. We compare against two in-context baselines. Full-Ctx puts the whole registry in the prompt and asks the LLM to pick. Search Pick gives the LLM a search tool to narrow candidates before it picks. At full scale the pipeline leads Search Pick by 6.5 percentage points (pp) on Match@1 at about half the cost. It reduces cost 70x versus Full-Ctx. We use a fixed configuration (same enrichment, retriever, and scorer weights) across agent, tool, and skill registries. The pipeline runs in production as the default capability-discovery layer of a large-scale multi-agent platform.
2023
Improving Low Resource Speech Translation with Data Augmentation and Ensemble Strategies
Akshaya Vishnu Kudlu Shanbhogue | Ran Xue | Soumya Saha | Daniel Zhang | Ashwinkumar Ganesan
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)
Akshaya Vishnu Kudlu Shanbhogue | Ran Xue | Soumya Saha | Daniel Zhang | Ashwinkumar Ganesan
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)
This paper describes the speech translation system submitted as part of the IWSLT 2023 shared task on low resource speech translation. The low resource task aids in building models for language pairs where the training corpus is limited. In this paper, we focus on two language pairs, namely, Tamasheq-French (Tmh→Fra) and Marathi-Hindi (Mr→Hi) and implement a speech translation system that is unconstrained. We evaluate three strategies in our system: (a) Data augmentation where we perform different operations on audio as well as text samples, (b) an ensemble model that integrates a set of models trained using a combination of augmentation strategies, and (c) post-processing techniques where we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) to improve the quality of sentences that are generated. Experiments show how data augmentation can relatively improve the BLEU score by 5.2% over the baseline system for Tmh→Fra while an ensemble model further improves performance by 17% for Tmh→Fra and 23% for Mr→Hi task.
2022
Improving Machine Translation Formality Control with Weakly-Labelled Data Augmentation and Post Editing Strategies
Daniel Zhang | Jiang Yu | Pragati Verma | Ashwinkumar Ganesan | Sarah Campbell
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)
Daniel Zhang | Jiang Yu | Pragati Verma | Ashwinkumar Ganesan | Sarah Campbell
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)
This paper describes Amazon Alexa AI’s implementation for the IWSLT 2022 shared task on formality control. We focus on the unconstrained and supervised task for en→hi (Hindi) and en→ja (Japanese) pairs where very limited formality annotated data is available. We propose three simple yet effective post editing strategies namely, T-V conversion, utilizing a verb conjugator and seq2seq models in order to rewrite the translated phrases into formal or informal language. Considering nuances for formality and informality in different languages, our analysis shows that a language-specific post editing strategy achieves the best performance. To address the unique challenge of limited formality annotations, we further develop a formality classifier to perform weakly labelled data augmentation which automatically generates synthetic formality labels from large parallel corpus. Empirical results on the IWSLT formality testset have shown that proposed system achieved significant improvements in terms of formality accuracy while retaining BLEU score on-par with baseline.