Time series captioning, the task of describing time series in natural language, requires numeric and temporal reasoning, trend interpretation, and contextual understanding. Existing benchmarks, however, often rely on fully synthetic or generic captions, and typically neglect metadata and visual representations. We introduce CaTS-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for Context-aware Time Series reasoning across 11 diverse domains, centered on a gold-standard evaluation set of 1746 human-rewritten captions that measure how effectively models translate numeric trends into immediately interpretable narratives. To address the scarcity of human-annotated data, we also propose a scalable pipeline for generating high-fidelity synthetic captions, the quality of which we validate. We evaluate leading Vision-Language Models on our benchmark, revealing that even proprietary models struggle to capture numeric nuances in temporal descriptions, while finetuning open-source models on synthetic data yields substantial performance gains. Finally, we release a diagnostic suite of 910 multiple-choice questions and use tailored numeric metrics to gauge time-series-specific reasoning capabilities, establishing CaTS-Bench as a reliable foundation for grounded, multimodal text generation in numeric domains.

Warehouse operations are governed by Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that encode complex, multi-system decision logic, which must be executed reliably under strict time constraints, yet LLM agents lack mechanisms to enforce procedural compliance and degrade under the context overload full SOP specifications introduce. We present Eluna, a production-deployed agentic system for reliable SOP execution. Eluna is a graph-guided, multi-agent framework that encodes SOPs as directed acyclic graphs with progressive disclosure and delegates independent tasks to parallel sub-agents, each with persistent code execution and live data access. To meet production latency and accuracy needs, we use asymmetric episodic distillation where a strong teacher is improved through episodic error memories, then a smaller student is fine-tuned on the corrected trajectories with memory stripped, internalizing corrections without inference-time overhead. On a 13-task benchmark and two production applications, our fine-tuned models match or exceed their teacher, beat all larger off-the-shelf baselines, and reach 94% expert agreement on the ticket processing application.

RL-based techniques can be employed to search for prompts that, when fed into a target language model, maximize a set of user-specified reward functions. However, in many target applications, the natural reward functions are in tension with one another – for example, content preservation vs. style matching in style transfer tasks. Current techniques focus on maximizing the average of reward functions, which does not necessarily lead to prompts that achieve balance across rewards – an issue that has been well-studied in the multi-objective and robust optimization literature. In this paper, we conduct an empirical comparison of several existing multi-objective optimization techniques adapted to this new setting: RL-based discrete prompt optimization. We compare two methods optimizing the volume of the Pareto reward surface and one method that chooses an update direction that benefits all rewards simultaneously. We evaluate performance on two NLP tasks: style transfer and machine translation, each using three competing reward functions. Our experiments demonstrate that multi-objective methods that directly optimize the volume of the Pareto reward surface perform better and achieve a better balance of all rewards than those that attempt to find monotonic update directions.