Thursday, June 15, 2023

Extend LangChain Sequences with Data Types

Target audience: Advanced
Estimated reading time: 4'  

Since its public debut last year, Generative AI, especially OpenAI's ChatGPT [ref 1], has captivated the collective imagination. Frameworks like LangChain [ref 2], built around LLM APIs, have subsequently emerged to streamline processes and workflows.

This post introduces the concept generative workflow by extending LangChain with typed input and condition on input values.The post assumes the reader is somewhat has some basic knowledge of Python, OpenAI ChatGPT and LangChain.

Table of contents

Introduction

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Notes: 

  • As I publish this post, OpenAI releases a new version of gpt-3.5-turbo that supports functions with typed input and output (ChatGPT functions)[ref 3]
  • The code snippets uses Python 3.9 and LangChain 0.0.200
  • To enhance the readability of the algorithm implementations, we have omitted non-essential code elements like error checking, comments, exceptions, validation of class and method arguments, scoping qualifiers, and import statements.
  • This post is not generated by ChatGPT but assumes the reader is already familiar with Large Language Model
  • The source code is available on GitHub https://github.com/patnicolas/chatgpt-patterns

Introduction

The LangChain Python framework built on OpenAI API to build large language models applications. The framework organizes ChatGPT API functionality into functional components, similar to Object-Oriented design). These components are assembled into customizable sequence or chains that can be dynamically configured. It allows developers to sequence of tasks (chains) with message/prompt as input (role=user) and answer (role=assistant) as output [ref 4]. This concept is analog to traditional function call

Let's consider a typical function call in Python
    def func(**kwargs: dict[str, any]) -> output_type:
        ....
       return x

It easy to establish an equivalence between the component of a method and the components of a chain.

PythonLLM
Function callLLM message/request
Function name (func)Prompt prefix
Argument (**kwargs)List of tuple (variable_name, variable_type, condition)
Returned type (output_type)LangChain output key

LangChain does not explicitly support types such as integer, dictionary, float.. in input messages. The next section extends LangChain functionality by adding types in ChatGPT request messages and given the data type, a condition or filter on the variable.

Example:

  • prompt prefix "Compute the sum of elements of an array"
  • Arguments:  (x, list[float], element > 0.5)

generate the following  prompt.  "Compute the sum of the elements of an array x of type list[float] for which elements > 0.5"

The next section describes the Python implementation of a workflow of typed chains for ChatGPT using LangChain framework.


Generative workflow

The first step is to install LangChain Python module and setup the OpenAI API key as an environment variable of target machine. The LangChain Quickstart guide [ref 5] is very concise and easy to follow so there is no need to duplicate the information in this post.

LLM chains and sequence are important functions of LangChain framework. They allow developers to build sequence of chains. It allows developers to assemble basic function, LLMChain into fully functional workflow or sequence (type SequentialChain)

Let's extend SequentialChain with typed and condition on input values by implemented a workflow is defined by the class ChatGPTTypedChains. The constructor has two arguments:

  • Temperature, _temperature, to initialize the ChatGPT request
  • Optional task definition, task_builder that define the task implemented as a chain
The task builder has two arguments:
  • task description (prompt)
  • List of input variables defined as tuple (name variables, data type, and optional condition of the variable
and the type of output value
The class member, input_keys captures the names of input to the workflow

from langchain.chat_models import ChatOpenAI
from langchain.prompts import ChatPromptTemplate
from langchain.chains import SequentialChain, LLMChain
from collections.abc import Callable

"""
    This class extends the langchain sequences by defining explicitly 
    - Task or goal of the request to ChatGPT
    - Typed arguments for the task

    The components of the prompt/message
    - Definition of the task (i.e. 'compute the exponential value of')
    - Input variables defined as tuple (name, type, condition) (i.e.  'x', 'list[float]', 'value < 0.8')
"""


class ChatGPTTypedChains(object):
  def __init__(self, _temperature: float, task_builder: Callable[[str, list[(str, str, str)]], str] = None):
      """
      Constructor for the typed sequence of LLM chains
      @param task_builder Builder or assembler for the prompt with {task definition and
                list of arguments {name, type, condition} as input and prompt as output
      @param _temperature Temperature for the softmax log probabilities
      @type _temperature: floating value >= 0.0
      """
      self.chains: list[LLMChain] = []
      self.llm = ChatOpenAI(temperature=_temperature)
      self.task_builder = task_builder if task_builder else ChatGPTTypedChains.__build_prompt
      self.input_keys: list[str] = []



Additional tasks are appended to the workflow with their 3 components
  • Task descriptor, task_definition (prompt)
  • Task parameters, arguments as tuple (name of input, type of input and optional condition)
  • Return type, as _output_key
The private, static method, _build_prompt assembles the task components to generate the actual prompt, this_input_prompt, then processed by the LangChain template generator.

def append(self, task_definition: str, arguments: list[(str, str, str)], _output_key: str) -> int:
   """
   Add a new task (LLM chain) into the current workflow...
   @param _output_key: Output key or variable
   @param task_definition: Definition or specification of the task
   @type arguments: List of tuple (variable_name, variable_type, variable_condition)
   """
       # We initialize the input variables for the workflow
   if len(self.input_keys) == 0:
      self.input_keys = [key for key, _, _ in arguments]

        # Build the prompt for this new prompt
   this_input_prompt = ChatGPTTypedChains.__build_prompt(task_definition, arguments)
   this_prompt = ChatPromptTemplate.from_template(this_input_prompt)

        # Create a new LLM chain and add it to the sequence
   this_llm_chain = LLMChain(llm=self.llm, prompt=this_prompt, output_key=_output_key)
   self.chains.append(this_llm_chain)
   return len(self.chains)


@staticmethod
def __build_prompt(task_definition: str, arguments: list[(str, str, str)]) -> str:
   def set_prompt(var_name: str, var_type: str, var_condition: str) -> str:
       prompt_variable_prefix = "{" + var_name + "} with type " + var_type
       return prompt_variable_prefix + " and " + var_condition \
                if not bool(var_condition) \
                else \
                prompt_variable_prefix

   embedded_input_vars = ", ".join(
            [set_prompt(var_name, var_type, var_condition) \ \
                for var_name, var_type, var_condition in arguments]
   )
   return f'{task_definition} {embedded_input_vars}'

The method __call__ implements the workflow as a LangChain sequence chain. This method takes two arguments: Input to the workflow (input to the first task) _input_values and the name/keys for the output values (output from the last task in the sequence).

def __call__(self, _input_values: dict[str, str], output_keys: list[str]) -> dict[str, any]:
   """
   Execute the sequence of typed task (LLM chains)
   @param _input_values: Input values to the sequence
   @param output_keys: Output keys for the sequence
   @return: Dictionary of output variable -> values
   """
   chains_sequence = SequentialChain(
            chains=self.chains,
            input_variables=self.arguments,
            output_variables=output_keys,
            verbose=True
    )
     return chains_sequence(_input_values)


Simple use cases

We select two simple use cases each implemented as workflow (LLM chain sequence) with the following tasks
  •   Two numerical tasks (math functions: sum and exp)
  •   Term frequency-Inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) scoring and ordering  task

Numerical computation chain

The sequence of chains, numeric_tasks of the two tasks consists of computing
  1. The sum of an array x of type list[float] or which values < 0.8
  2. Apply the exponential function to the sum

In this particular example, an array of 120 floating point values are generated through a sin function then filter through the condition x < 0.8. The output value is a dictionary with a single key 'u'.

def numeric_tasks() -> dict[str, str]:
   import math

   chat_gpt_seq = ChatGPTTypedChains(0.0)
   
   # First task:  implement lambda x: sin(x*0.001)
   input_x = ','.join([str(math.sin(n * 0.001)) for n in range(128)])
   chat_gpt_seq.append("Sum these values ", [('x', 'list[float]', 'values < 0.8')], 'res')
    , 
   # Second task: function u: exp(sum(x))
   chat_gpt_seq.append("Compute the exponential value of ", [('res', 'float', '')], 'u')
   input_values = {'x': input_x}
   output: dict[str, str] = chat_gpt_seq(input_values, ["u"])

   return output



TF-IDF score

This second use case consists of two tasks (LLM chains)

  1. Computation of TF-IDF score, tf_idf_score of terms extracted from 3 documents/files (file1.txt, file2.txt, file3.txt). The key for input values, documents, is the content of the 3 documents.
  2. Ordering the items by their TF-IDF score. The output key, ordered_list is the list of terms ranked by their decreasing TF-IDF score.

def load_content(file_name: str) -> str:
  with open(file_name, 'r') as f:
      return f.read()


def load_text(file_names: list[str]) -> list[str]:
  return [load_content(file_name) for file_name in file_names]


def tf_idf_score() -> str:
   chat_gpt_seq = ChatGPTTypedChains(0.0)

   # Load documents for which TF-IDF score has to be computed
   input_files = ['../input/file1.txt', '../input/file2.txt', '../input/file2.txt']
   input_documents = '```'.join(load_text(input_files))

   # Create first task: Compute the 
   chat_gpt_seq.append(
        "Compute the TF-IDF score for words from documents delimited by triple backticks with output format term:TF-IDF score ```",
        [('documents', 'list[str]', '')], 'terms_tf_idf_score')
  
   # Create a second task  
  chat_gpt_seq.append("Sort the terms and TF-IDF score by decreasing order of TF-IDF score",
                         [('terms_tf_idf_score', 'list[float]', '')], 'ordered_list')

   output = chat_gpt_seq({'documents': input_documents}, ["ordered_list"])
   return output['ordered_list']


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References




---------------------------
Patrick Nicolas has over 25 years of experience in software and data engineering, architecture design and end-to-end deployment and support with extensive knowledge in machine learning. 
He has been director of data engineering at Aideo Technologies since 2017 and he is the author of "Scala for Machine Learning" Packt Publishing ISBN 978-1-78712-238-3