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).

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.

Temporal question answering (QA) is a special category of complex question answering task that requires reasoning over facts asserting time intervals of events. Previous works have predominately relied on Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) for temporal QA. One of the major challenges faced by these systems is their inability to retrieve all relevant facts due to factors such as incomplete KB and entity/relation linking errors. A failure to fetch even a single fact will block KBQA from computing the answer. Such cases of KB incompleteness are even more profound in the temporal context. To address this issue, we explore an interesting direction where a targeted temporal fact extraction technique is used to assist KBQA whenever it fails to retrieve temporal facts from the KB. We model the extraction problem as an open-domain question answering task using off-the-shelf language models. This way, we target to extract from textual resources those facts that failed to get retrieved from the KB. Experimental results on two temporal QA benchmarks show promising ~30% & ~10% relative improvements in answer accuracies without any additional training cost.

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) involving complex reasoning is emerging as an important research direction. However, most KBQA systems struggle with generalizability, particularly on two dimensions: (a) across multiple knowledge bases, where existing KBQA approaches are typically tuned to a single knowledge base, and (b) across multiple reasoning types, where majority of datasets and systems have primarily focused on multi-hop reasoning. In this paper, we present SYGMA, a modular KBQA approach developed with goal of generalization across multiple knowledge bases and multiple reasoning types. To facilitate this, SYGMA is designed as two high level modules: 1) KB-agnostic question understanding module that remain common across KBs, and generates logic representation of the question with high level reasoning constructs that are extensible, and 2) KB-specific question mapping and answering module to address the KB-specific aspects of the answer extraction. We evaluated SYGMA on multiple datasets belonging to distinct knowledge bases (DBpedia and Wikidata) and distinct reasoning types (multi-hop and temporal). State-of-the-art or competitive performances achieved on those datasets demonstrate its generalization capability.

Entity linking (EL) is the task of disambiguating mentions appearing in text by linking them to entities in a knowledge graph, a crucial task for text understanding, question answering or conversational systems. In the special case of short-text EL, which poses additional challenges due to limited context, prior approaches have reached good performance by employing heuristics-based methods or purely neural approaches. Here, we take a different, neuro-symbolic approach that combines the advantages of using interpretable rules based on first-order logic with the performance of neural learning. Even though constrained to use rules, we show that we reach competitive or better performance with SoTA black-box neural approaches. Furthermore, our framework has the benefits of extensibility and transferability. We show that we can easily blend existing rule templates given by a human expert, with multiple types of features (priors, BERT encodings, box embeddings, etc), and even with scores resulting from previous EL methods, thus improving on such methods. As an example of improvement, on the LC-QuAD-1.0 dataset, we show more than 3% increase in F1 score relative to previous SoTA. Finally, we show that the inductive bias offered by using logic results in a set of learned rules that transfers from one dataset to another, sometimes without finetuning, while still having high accuracy.