NVIDIA KGMON places second in KDD Cup 2026 Data Agents with constrained agent harness
The NVIDIA KGMON team placed second in the KDD Cup 2026 Data Agents competition by building a tightly constrained agent harness around a small, fixed LLM. Key techniques included unifying structured data into a single SQLite interface, a preflight schema-scouting step, a minimal toolset (schema(), sql(), write_answer(df), prose_helper()), middleware to repair malformed calls, separation of document inspection via zero-temperature LLM calls, and execution-trace logging to diagnose failures; recorded sessions and slides from the competition are in the KDD presentation archive.