Shreya Shankar

Author directory

2026

Users across enterprises increasingly rely on LLM agents to query their data through natural language. However, building reliable data agents remains difficult because real enterprise data is fragmented across many heterogeneous database systems, with duplicated and inconsistent data, and key information often buried in unstructured text—requiring agents to go beyond just writing SQL or data science scripts to answer questions. Existing benchmarks tackle only individual pieces of this end-to-end workflow—e.g., text-to-SQL over a single database—and are increasingly saturated and contaminated. We present a new benchmark for LLM agents, the Data Agent Benchmark (DAB), grounded in a study of enterprises building production data agents across six industries. DAB comprises 104 queries across 17 datasets and 4 database management systems. On DAB, the best state-of-the-art agent achieves only 57% pass@1. We analyze agent failure modes and distill takeaways for future data-agent development. Our benchmark and experiment code are published at [URL redacted for anonymous review].

2025

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in specialized production data processing pipelines across diverse domains—such as finance, marketing, and e-commerce. However, when running them in production across many inputs, they often fail to follow instructions or meet developer expectations. To improve reliability in these applications, creating assertions or guardrails for LLM outputs to run alongside the pipelines is essential. Yet, determining the right set of assertions that capture developer requirements for a task is challenging. In this paper, we introduce PROMPTEVALS, a dataset of 2087 LLM pipeline prompts with 12623 corresponding assertion criteria, sourced from developers using our open-source LLM pipeline tools. This dataset is larger than previous collections. Using a hold-out test split of PROMPTEVALS as a benchmark, we evaluated closed- and open-source models in generating relevant assertions. Notably, our fine-tuned Mistral and Llama 3 models outperform GPT-4o by 20.93% on average, offering both reduced latency and improved performance. We believe our dataset can spur further research in LLM reliability, alignment, and prompt engineering.