Constrained-Text-Genera VS guidance

Oh my god. I wrote a whole library called "Constrained Text Generation Studio" where I mused that I wanted a "Photoshop for Text". I'm not even sure which work predates the other: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

The core idea of a "photoshop for text", specifically a word processor made for prosumers supporting GenAI first class (i.e oobabooga but actually good) - is worth so much. If you're a VC reading this, chances are I want to talk to you to actually execute on the idea from the OP

I was working on this stuff before it was cool, so in the sense of the precursor to LLMs (and sometimes supporting LLMs still) I've built many things:

1. Games you can play with word2vec or related models (could be drop in replaced with sentence transformer). It's crazy that this is 5 years old now: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Language-games

2. "Constrained Text Generation Studio" - A research project I wrote when I was trying to solve LLM's inability to follow syntactic, phonetic, or semantic constraints: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

3. DebateKG - A bunch of "Semantic Knowledge Graphs" built on my pet debate evidence dataset (LLM backed embeddings indexes synchronized with a graphDB and a sqlDB via txtai). Can create compelling policy debate cases https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/DebateKG

4. My failed attempt at a good extractive summarizer. My life work is dedicated to one day solving the problems I tried to fix with this project: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8

My mental model for LLMs was built by carefully studying the distribution of its output vocabulary at every time step.

There are tools that allow you to right click and see all possible continuations for an LLM like you would in a code IDE[1]. Seeing what this vocabulary is[2] and how trivial modifications to the prompt can impact probabilities will do a lot for improving the mental model of how LLM operate.

Shameless self plug, but software which can do what I am describing is here, and it's worth noting that it ended up as peer reviewed research.

[1] https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

Yeah, the LLM outputs a distribution of likely next tokens. It is up to the decoder to select one, and it can use a grammar to enforce certain rules on the output. https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera... or https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/grammars/... for example.

I am in love with this, I tried my hand at building a Constrained Text Generation Studio (https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...), and got published at COLING 2022 for my paper on it (https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...), but I always knew that something like this or the related idea enumerated in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03081 was the way to go.

I agree with you, and I'm SHOCKED at how little work there actually is in phonetics within the NLP community. Consider that most of the phonetic tools that I am using to enforce rhyming or similar syntactic constrained in constrained text generation studio (https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...) were built circa 2014, such as the CMU rhyming dictionary. In most cases, I could not find better modern implementations of these tools.

I did learn an awful lot about phonetic representations and matching algorithms. Things like "soundex" and "double metaphone" now make sense to me and are fascinating to read about.

https://github.com/hellisotherpeople/constrained-text-genera...

Just ban the damn tokens and try again. I wish that folks had more intuition around tokenization, and why LLMs struggle to follow syntactic, lexical, or phonetic constraints.

My work on constrained text generation / filter assisted decoding for LLMS is cited in this article! One of my proudest moments was being noticed by my senpai Gwern!

https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...

I want to update that just because GPT-4 appears to be far better at following constraints, doesn't mean that it's anywhere near perfect at following them. It's better now at my easy example of "ban the letter e" but if you ask for several constraints, or mixing lexical and phonetic constraints, it gets pretty awful pretty quickly. Filter assisted decoding can make any LLM (no matter how awful they are) follow constraints perfectly.

I can't wait to get someone whose better at coding than me to implement these techniques in the major LLM frontends (oogabooga, llamma.ccp, etc) since my attempt at it was quite poopy research code: https://github.com/hellisotherpeople/constrained-text-genera...

The paper at COLING 2022 that I wrote, titled "Most language models can be poets too" included a GUI constrained text generation studio that I market as being "Like Photoshop but for text"

https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

[1]: https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance/tree/main

> The most obvious usage of this is forcing a model to output valid JSON

Isn't this something that Outlines [0], Guidance [1] and others [2] already solve much more elegantly?

0. https://github.com/outlines-dev/outlines

1. https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance

2. https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang

Or combine it with something like llama.cpp's grammer or microsoft's guidance-ai[0] (which I prefer) which would allow adding some react-style prompting and external tools. As others have mentioned, instruct tuning would help too.

[0] https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance

have been experimenting with guidance and lmql. a bit too early to give any well formed opinions but really do like the idea of constraining llm output.

Thanks for your comment.

I did not know about "Betteridge's law of headlines", quite interesting. Thanks for sharing :)

You raise some interesting points.

1) Safety: It is true that LVMs and LLMs have unknown biases and could potentially create unsafe content. However, this is not necessarily unique to them, for example, Google had the same problem with their supervised learning model https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go.... It all depends on the original data. I believe we need systems on top of our models to ensure safety. It is also possible to restrict the output domain of our models (https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance). Instead of allowing our LVMs to output any words, we could restrict it to only being able to answer "red, green, blue..." when giving the color of a car.

2) Cost: You are right right now LVMs are quite expensive to run. As you said are a great way to go to market faster but they cannot run on low-cost hardware for the moment. However, they could help with training those smaller models. Indeed, with see in the NLP domain that a lot of smaller models are trained on data created with GPT models. You can still distill the knowledge of your LVMs into a custom smaller model that can run on embedded devices. The advantage is that you can use your LVMs to generate data when it is scarce and use it as a fallback when your smaller device is uncertain of the answer.

3) Labelling data: I don't think labeling data is necessarily cheap. First, you have to collect the data, depending on the frequency of your events could take months of monitoring if you want to build a large-scale dataset. Lastly, not all labeling is necessarily cheap. I worked at a semiconductor company and labeled data was scarce as it required expert knowledge and could only be done by experienced employees. Indeed not all labelling can be done externally.

However, both approaches are indeed complementary and I think systems that will work the best will rely on both.

Thanks again for the thought-provoking discussion. I hope this answer some of the concerns you raised

I've had a bit of trouble getting function calling to work with cases that aren't just extracting some data from the input. The format is correct but it was harder to get the correct data if it wasn't a simple extraction.

Hopefully OpenAI and others will offer something like https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance at some point to guarantee overall output structure.

Failed validations will retry, but from what I've seen JSONSchema + generated JSON examples are decently reliable in practice for gpt-3.5-turbo and extremely reliable on gpt-4.