langroid VS text-generation-webui

This was indeed true in the beginning, and I don’t know if this has changed. Inserting messages with Assistant role is crucial for many reasons, such as if you want to implement caching, or otherwise edit/compress a previous assistant response for cost or other reason.

At the time I implemented a work-around in Langroid[1]: since you can only insert a “user” role message, prepend the content with ASSISTANT: whenever you want it to be treated as an assistant role. This actually works as expected and I was able to do caching. I explained it in this forum:

https://community.openai.com/t/add-custom-roles-to-messages-...

[1] the Langroid code that adds a message with a given role, using this above “assistant spoofing trick”:

https://github.com/langroid/langroid/blob/main/langroid/agen...

Same question here. Ollama is fantastic as it makes it very easy to run models locally, But if you already have a lot of code that processes OpenAI API responses (with retry, streaming, async, caching etc), it would be nice to be able to simply switch the API client to Ollama, without having to have a whole other branch of code that handles Alama API responses. One way to do an easy switch is using the litellm library as a go-between but it’s not ideal (and I also recently found issues with their chat formatting for mistral models).

For an OpenAI compatible API my current favorite method is to spin up models using oobabooga TGW. Your OpenAI API code then works seamlessly by simply switching out the api_base to the ooba endpoint. Regarding chat formatting, even ooba’s Mistral formatting has issues[1] so I am doing my own in Langroid using HuggingFace tokenizer.apply_chat_template [2]

[1] https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/issues/53...

[2] https://github.com/langroid/langroid/blob/main/langroid/lang...

Related question - I assume ollama auto detects and applies the right chat formatting template for a model?

we (like simpleaichat from OP) leverage Pydantic to specify the desired structured output, and under the hood Langroid translates it to either the OpenAI function-calling params or (for LLMs that don’t natively support fn-calling), auto-insert appropriate instructions into tje system-prompt. We call this mechanism a ToolMessage:

https://github.com/langroid/langroid/blob/main/langroid/agen...

We take this idea much further — you can define a method in a ChatAgent to “handle” the tool and attach the tool to the agent. For stateless tools you can define a “handle” method in the tool itself and it gets patched into the ChatAgent as the handler for the tool.

Many services/platforms are careless/disingenuous when they claim they “train” on your documents, where they actually mean they do RAG.

An under-appreciate benefit of RAG is the ability to have the LLM cite sources for its answers (which are in principle automatically/manually verifiable). You lose this citation ability when you finetune on your documents.

In Langroid (the Multi-Agent framework from ex-CMU/UW-Madison researchers) https://github.com/langroid/langroid

This resonates with the approach we’ve taken in Langroid (the Multi-Agent framework from ex-CMU/UW-Madison researchers): our DocChatAgent uses a combination of lexical and semantic retrieval, reranking and relevance extraction to improve precision and recall:

https://github.com/langroid/langroid/blob/main/langroid/agen...

In the Langroid library (a multi-agent framework from ex-CMU/UW-Madison researchers) we have these and more. For example here’s a script that combines web search and RAG:

https://github.com/langroid/langroid/blob/main/examples/docq...

Thanks, also found Langdroid: https://github.com/langroid/langroid/blob/main/README.md

Some of the tools offer a path to doing tool use (fetching URLs and doing things with them) or RAG (searching your documents). I think Oobabooga https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui offers the latter through plugins.

Our tool, https://github.com/transformerlab/transformerlab-app also supports the latter (document search) using local llms.

You can use webui https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

Once you get a version up and running I make a copy before I update it as several times updates have broken my working version and caused headaches.

a decent explanation of parameters outside of reading archive papers: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/wiki/03-%...

a news ai website:

The other answers are recommending paths which give you #1. less control and #2. projects with smaller eco-systems.

If you want a truly general purpose front-end for LLMs, the only good solution right now is oobabooga: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

All other alternatives have only small fractions of the features that oobabooga supports. All other alternatives only support a fraction of the LLM backends that oobabooga supports, etc.

The example waifu in text-generation-webui is good enough for me.

https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/blob/main...

> Downloading text-generation-webui takes a minute, let's you use any model and get going.

What you're missing here is you're already in this area deep enough to know what ooogoababagababa text-generation-webui is. Let's back out to the "average Windows desktop user" level. Assuming they even know how to find it:

1) Go to https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui?tab=readm...

2) See a bunch of instructions opening a terminal window and running random batch/powershell scripts. Powershell, etc will likely prompt you with a scary warning. Then you start wondering who ooobabagagagaba is...

3) Assuming you get this far (many users won't even get to step 1) you're greeted with a web interface[0] FILLED to the brim with technical jargon and extremely overwhelming options just to get a model loaded, which is another mind warp because you get to try to select between a bunch of random models with no clear meaning and non-sensical/joke sounding names from someone called "TheBloke". Ok...

Let's say you somehow braved this gauntlet and get this far now you get to chat with it. Ok, what about my local documents? text-generation-webui itself has nothing for that. Repeat this process over the 10 random open source projects from a bunch of names you've never heard of in an attempt to accomplish that.

This is "I saw this thing from Nvidia explode all over media, twitter, youtube, etc. I downloaded it from Nvidia, double-clicked, pointed it at a folder with documents, and it works".

That's the difference and it's very significant.

[0] - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oobabooga/screenshots/main...

Maybe a copout answer, but setting up a local LLM on my development machine has been invaluable. I use Deep Seek Coder 6.7 [0] and Oobabooga's UI [1]. It helps me solve simple problems and find bugs, while still leaving the larger architecture decisions to me.

[0] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/deepseek-coder-6.7b-instr...

[1] https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

You can download it and run it with [this](https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui). There's an API mode that you could leverage from your VS Code extension.

Same question here. Ollama is fantastic as it makes it very easy to run models locally, But if you already have a lot of code that processes OpenAI API responses (with retry, streaming, async, caching etc), it would be nice to be able to simply switch the API client to Ollama, without having to have a whole other branch of code that handles Alama API responses. One way to do an easy switch is using the litellm library as a go-between but it’s not ideal (and I also recently found issues with their chat formatting for mistral models).

For an OpenAI compatible API my current favorite method is to spin up models using oobabooga TGW. Your OpenAI API code then works seamlessly by simply switching out the api_base to the ooba endpoint. Regarding chat formatting, even ooba’s Mistral formatting has issues[1] so I am doing my own in Langroid using HuggingFace tokenizer.apply_chat_template [2]

[1] https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/issues/53...

[2] https://github.com/langroid/langroid/blob/main/langroid/lang...

Related question - I assume ollama auto detects and applies the right chat formatting template for a model?