dspy VS outlines

Legal practitioners often need to find specific cases and clauses across thousands of dense documents. While traditional keyword-based search techniques are useful, they fail to fully capture semantic content of queries and case files. Vector search engines and large language models provide an intriguing alternative. In this talk, I will show you how to build a legal search application using the DSPy framework and the Milvus vector search engine.

I’ve observed that Pydantic - which we’ve used for years in our API stack - has become very popular in LLM applications, for its type-adjacent features. It serves as a foundational technology for prompting libraries like [DSPy](https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy) which are abstracting “up the stack” of LLM apps. (some opinions there)

Operating AI apps reveals a big challenge, in that debugging probabilistic code paths requires more than the usual introspective abilities, and in an environment where function calls can have very real monetary impact we have to be able to see what’s happening in the runtime. See LangChain’s hosted solution (can’t recall the name) that allows an operator to see prompts and responses “on the wire”. (It just occurred to me that Langchain and Pydantic have a lot in common here, in approach.)

Having a coupling between Pydantic - which is *just about* the data layer itself - and an observability tool seems very interesting to me, and having this come from the folks who built it does not seem unreasonable. WRT open source and monetization, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried - given the recent few months - but I am choosing to see this in a positive light, given this team’s “believability weight” (to overuse Dalio) and history of delivering solid and really useful tooling.

DSPy is the best tool for optimizing prompts [0]: https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Think of it as a meta-prompt optimizer, it uses a LLM to optimize your prompts, to optimize your LLM.

Isn’t this just a very naive implementation of what DsPY does?

https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

I don’t understand what is exceptional here.

Have you done any comparison with DSPy ? (https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy)

Feels very similiar to DSPy except you dont have optimizations yet. But I like your API and the programming model your are enforcing through this.

I'm interested in hearing if anyone has used DSPy (https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy) just for prompt optimization for GPT-3.5 or GPT-4. Was it worth the effort and much better than manual prompt iteration? Was the optimized prompt some weird incantation? Any other insights?

You should check out x.com/lateinteraction's DSPy — which is like an optimizer for prompts — https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

> [2]: https://github.com/outlines-dev/outlines?tab=readme-ov-file#...

It's interesting as speech recognition has become more popular than ever through services like Alexa, and other iot devices support for OS speech recognition

Unfortunately most implementations (especially those that are iot focused) don't have very important features for robust speech recognition.

1. Ability to enable and disable a grammar

[4] https://github.com/outlines-dev/outlines/tree/main

The next step is defining how to guide generation. For this step, we'll use the Outlines library. Outlines is a library for controlling how tokens are generated. It applies logic to enforce schemas, regular expressions and/or specific output formats such as JSON.

No benchmarks, just my anecdotal experience trying to get local LLM's to respond with JSON. The method above works for my use case nearly 100% of the time. Other things I've tried (e.g. `outlines`[0]) are really slow or don't work at all. Would love to hear what others have tried!

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

As I was playing with the Outlines library (https://outlines-dev.github.io/outlines/), I discussed with my friend Maxime how funny it would be if we set up a way to pair LLMs in chess matches till one wins. The first time I tried it, it required substantial prompt engineering to get some of those LLMs to propose valid moves. Large language models can mostly stay focused and even play rather well; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616170 for example. However small language models aren't as easy to convince.

Some of those LLMs have seen very little chess notation and so after the first few opening moves there aren't any valid tactics, let alone strategy, so they would end up either repeating the same move, or hallucinate moves that are not valid (Kxe5, but there would be a queen on e5!)

Then Outlines came along and we could force them to pick valid moves with little cost! Maxime worked super fast and got a first version of this idea as a gradio space.

I think it is pretty fun to see the (mostly terrible, but otherwise valid) chess that those LLMs play. Maybe it will even be instructive to how we can create small LLMs that can play much better than the ones on the leaderboard.

Anyway, you can check it out here:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/mlabonne/chessllm

What is interactive about it: you can pick the LLMs from available models on HuggingFace (within reason, small LLMs are preferable so that the space does not crash) or push one of your own small models to HF and have it fight with others. At the end of the game the leaderboard is updated.

Hope you find it fun!

> 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

And I think “just” Markdown doesn’t quite cut it for safe guidance. For example: directly generating content for your components. But I’m really excited about tooling like outlines appearing, with a greater focus on guided generation for structured data. Because this is often what we actually need!

It's pretty easy to force a locally running model to always output valid JSON: when it gives you probabilities for the next tokens, discard all tokens that would result in invalid JSON at that point (basically reverse parsing), and then apply the usual techniques to pick the completion only from the remaining tokens. You can even validate against a JSON schema that way, so long as it is simple enough.

There are a bunch of libraries for this already, e.g.: https://github.com/outlines-dev/outlines

https://github.com/outlines-dev/outlines/blob/7fae436345e621... squares with my experience using LLMs for anything real

  sequence = generator("Alice had 4 apples and Bob ate 2. Write an expression for Alice's apples:")