LLM Command Generators

How an LLM-based Command Generator Work#

The job of an LLM-based command generator is to ingest information about a conversation so far. It outputs a sequence of commands that represent how the user wants to progress the conversation.

For example, if you defined a flow called transfer_money, and a user starts a conversation by saying "I need to transfer some money", the correct command output would be StartFlow("transfer_money").

If you asked the user a yes/no question (using a collect step) and they say "yes.", the correct command output is SetSlot(slot_name, True).

If the user answers the question but also requests something new, like "yes. Oh what's my balance?", the command output might be [SetSlot(slot_name, True), StartFlow("check_balance")].

By generating a sequence of commands, Dialogue Understanding is a better way to represent what the user wants than a classification-based NLU system.

The LLM-based command generators also use a flow retrieval sub-module to ensure the input context size does not linearly scale up with the size of the assistant.

Types of LLM-based Command Generators#

Rasa currently has two LLM-based command generators: SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator and MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator.

To use one of the two CommandGenerators in your AI assistant, add the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator or the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator to your NLU pipeline in the config.yml file. Read more about the config.yml file here and how to configure LLM models here

The SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator and MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator requires access to an LLM API. You can use any OpenAI model that supports the /chat endpoint such as "gpt-3.5-turbo" or "gpt-4". We are working on expanding the list of supported models and model providers.

SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator#

To interpret the user's message in context, the current implementation of the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator uses in-context learning, information about the current state of the conversation, and flows defined in your assistant. Descriptions and slot definitions of each flow are included in the prompt as relevant information. However, to scale to a large number of flows, the LLM-based command generator includes only the flows that are relevant to the current state of the conversation, see flow retrieval.

Prompt Template#

The default prompt template serves as a dynamic framework enabling the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator to render prompts. The template consists of a static component, as well as dynamic components that get filled in when rendering a prompt:

• Current state of the conversation - This part of the template captures the ongoing dialogue.
• Defined flows and slots - This part of the template provides the context and structure for the conversation. It outlines the overarching theme, guiding the model's understanding of the conversation's purpose.
• Active flow and slot - Active elements within the conversation that require the model's attention.

Customization#

You can customize the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator as much as you wish. General customization options that are available for both LLMCommandGenerators are listed in the section General Customizations.

Customizing the Prompt Template#

If you cannot get something to work via editing the flow and slot descriptions (see section customizing the prompt), you can go one level deeper and customise the prompt template used to drive the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator. To do this, write your own prompt as a jinja2 template and provide it to the component as a file:

The prompt template also allows the utilization of variables to incorporate dynamic information. You can access the comprehensive list of available variables here to use in your custom prompt template.

• Iterating over the flow_slots variable can be useful to create a prompt that lists all the slots of the current active flow,

• Iterating over the available_flows variable can be useful to create a prompt that lists all the flows,

MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator#

The MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator also uses in-context learning to interpret the user's message in context, but breaks down the task into several steps to make the job of the LLM easier. The component was designed to enable cheaper and smaller LLMs, such as gpt-3.5-turbo, as viable alternatives to costlier but more powerful models such as gpt-4.

The steps are:

• handling the flows (starting, ending, etc.) and
• filling out the slots

Accordingly, instead of just a single prompt that handles everything, the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator has two prompts:

• handle_flows and
• fill_slots.

The following diagram shows which prompt is used when:

If no flow is currently active, the handle_flows prompt is used to start or clarify flows. If a flow is started, next the fill_slots prompt is executed to fill any slots of the newly started flow.

If a flow is currently active, the fill_slots prompt is called to fill any new slots of the currently active flow. If the user message (also) indicates that, for example, a new flow should be started or the active flow should be canceled, a ChangeFlow command is triggered. This results in calling the handle_flows prompt to start, cancel, or clarify flows. If that prompt leads to starting a flow, the fill_slots prompt is executed again to fill any slots of that new flow.

Prompt Templates#

The default prompt templates serve as a dynamic framework enabling the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator to render prompts. The templates consists of a static component, as well as dynamic components that get filled in when rendering a prompt.

Customization#

You can customize the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator as much as you wish. General customization options that are available for both LLMCommandGenerators are listed in the section General Customizations.

Customizing The Prompt Template#

If you cannot get something to work via editing your flow and slot descriptions (see section customizing the prompt), you can go one level deeper and customise the prompt templates used to drive the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator. To do this, write your own prompt as a jinja2 template and provide it to the component as a file:

You can customize both prompts using the example configuration above, or you can choose to customize only a specific prompt.

The prompt template also allows the utilization of variables to incorporate dynamic information.

handle_flows#

Here is a comprehensive list of available variables to use in your custom handle_flows prompt template:

• Iterating over the available_flows variable can be useful to create a prompt that lists all the flows,

By default following commands can be predicted in this step: StartFlow, Clarify, CancelFlow, CannotHandle.

fill_slots#

Here is a comprehensive list of available variables to use in your custom fill_slots prompt template:

• Iterating over the flow_slots or the top_user_flow_slots variable can be useful to create a prompt that lists all the slots of the current active flow (can be a pattern) or the top user flow,

• Iterating over the available_flows variable can be useful to create a prompt that lists all the flows,

By default only SetSlot commands can be predicted in this step.

Prompt Tuning#

Apart from the prompt customization proposed in the section on Customizing The Prompt, the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator might benefit from some additional prompt tuning.

Few-shot learning#

Few-shot learning is a machine learning approach in which an AI model learns to make accurate predictions by being trained on a very small number of labeled examples. Our internal experiments showed that adding some examples of user message to command pairs to the prompt template handle_flows helped to improve the performance of the LLM, especially for the Clarify command.

To do so, curate a small list of user message - action list pairs of examples that are specific to the domain of your assistant. Next, you can add them to the prompt template handle_flows after line 22. Here is an example:

Language of the prompt#

In our internal experiments, we have found that smaller LLMs benefit from having the complete prompt in a single language. Hence, if your assistant is built to understand and respond to a user in a language other than English and the flows descriptions as well as the collect step descriptions are in that same language, the LLM might benefit from translating the prompt template to that language as well. For example, assume users are talking in German to your assistant and the flow descriptions and collect step descriptions are also in German. To simplify the job of the LLM it might help to translate the complete prompt template to German as well.

You can use strong LLMs, such as gpt-4, for translating. However, we recommend to manually check the prompt templates after translating it automatically.

Formatting#

In both prompt templates, handle_flows and fill_slots, we iterate over the flows and/or the slots. Depending on the descriptions you wrote for those, it might make sense to update the for loop in the prompt templates.

For example, if your slot descriptions are rather long and contain a list of bullet points, the slot list in the final prompt might look like this:

As you see it is quite hard to distinguish between the description and the actual slots.

To help the LLM to clearly distinguish between the slot and the description, we recommend to update the for loop in the jinja2 prompt template as follows:

This results in the following:

Current Limitations#

The MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator will be able to generate the following commands:

• in handle_flows step: StartFlow, Clarify, CancelFlow, CannotHandle.
• in fill_slots step: SetSlot. The CannotHandle command will be triggered from the handle_flows prompt when the scope of the user message is beyond starting, canceling, or clarifying a flow. The command will trigger the cannot handle pattern to indicate that the user message can not be treated as expected.

Retrieving Relevant Flows#

As your assitant's skill set evolves, the number of functional flows will likely expand into the hundreds. However, due to the constraints of the LLM's context window, it is impractical to present all these flows simultaneously to the LLM. To ensure efficiency, only a subset of flows that are relevant to a given conversation will be considered. We implement a flow retrieval mechanism to identify and filter the most relevant flows for the command generator. This targeted selection helps in crafting effective prompts that are within the limit of the LLM's context window.

The ability to retrieve relevant flows has a training component attached to it. During training, all defined flows with flow guards potentially evaluating to true are transformed into documents containing flow descriptions and (optionally) slot descriptions and allowed slot values. These documents are then transformed into vectors using the embedding model and stored in a vector store.

When talking to the assistant, i.e. during inference, the current conversation context is transformed into a vector and compared against the flows in the vector store. This comparison identifies the flows that are most similar to the current conversation context and includes them into the prompt of the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator and the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator.

However, additional rules are applied to select or discard certain flows:

• Any flow with a flow guard evaluating to False is excluded.
• Any flow marked with the always_include_in_prompt property set to true is always included, provided that the flow guard(if defined) evaluates to true.
• All flows that are active during the current conversation context are always included.

This feature of retrieving only the relevant flows and including them in the prompt is enabled by default. Read more about configuring the options here.

The performance of the flow retrieval depends on the quality of flow descriptions. Good descriptions improve the differentiation among flows covering similar topics but also boost the alignment between the intended user actions and the flows. For tips on how to write good descriptions, you can check out our guidelines.

General Customization#

The following customizations are available for the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator as well as for the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator.

LLM configuration#

To specify the OpenAI model to use for the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator or the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator, set the llm.model property in the config.yml file:

The model defaults to gpt-4 for the SingleStepLLMCommandGenerator and defaults to gpt-3.5-turbo for the MultiStepLLMCommandGenerator. The model name should be set to a chat model of OpenAI.

Similarly, you can specify the timeout and temperature parameters for the LLM. The timeout defaults to 7 seconds and the temperature defaults to 0.0.

If you want to use Azure OpenAI Service, configure the necessary parameters as described in the Azure OpenAI Service section.

Customizing The Prompt#

Because the LLMCommandGenerators use in-context learning, one of the primary ways to tweak or improve performance is to customize the prompt.

In most cases, you can achieve what you need by customizing the description fields in your flows. Every flow has its own description field; optionally, every step in your flow can also have one. If you notice a flow is triggered when it shouldn't, or a slot is not extracted correctly, adding more detail to the description will often solve the issue.

For example, if you have a transfer_money flow with a collect step for the slot amount, you can add a description to extract the value more reliably:

Use the following guidelines to write informative and contextually rich flow descriptions.

1. Provide information-dense descriptions: Ensure flow descriptions are precise and informative, directly outlining the flow's purpose and scope. Aim for a balance between brevity and the density of information, using imperative language and avoiding unnecessary words to prevent ambiguity. The goal is to convey essential information as clearly as possible.
2. Use clear and standard language: Avoid unusual phrasing or choice of words. Stick to clear, universally understood language.
3. Explicitly define context: Explicitly define the flow context to increase the models situational awareness. The embedding models used for retrieving only the relevant flows lacks situational awareness. It can't figure out the context or read between the lines beyond what's directly described in the flow.
4. Clarify implicit knowledge: Clarify any specialized knowledge in descriptions (e.g. if there are brand names mentioned: what is brand domain; if the product name is mentioned: what is the product about). The embedding model that is used for retrieving only the relevant flows is unlikely to produce good embeddings regarding brands and their products.
5. (Optional) Adding example user utterances: While strictly not required, adding example user utterances can add more context to the flow descriptions. This can also ensure that the embeddings will closely match the user inputs. This should be considered more as a remedy, rather than a cure. If user utterances improve performance, it suggests they provide new information that could be directly incorporated into flow descriptions.

Customizing flow retrieval#

The ability to retrieve only the relevant flows for inclusion in the prompt at inference time is activated by default. To configure it, you can modify the settings under the flow_retrieval property. The default configuration uses text-embedding-ada-002 embedding model from OpenAI:

You can adjust the embedding provider and model. More on supported embeddings and how to configure those can be found here.

Additionally, you can also configure:

• turns_to_embed - The number of conversation turns to be transformed into a vector and compared against the flows in the vector store. Setting the value to 1 means that only the latest conversation turn is used. Increasing the number of turns expands the conversation context window.
• should_embed_slots - Whether to embed the slot descriptions along with the flow description during training (True / False).
• num_flows - The maximum number of flows to be retrieved from the vector store.

Below is a configuration with default values:

The flow retrieval can also be disabled by setting the flow_retrieval.active field to false:

Customizing the maximum length of user input#

To restrict the length of user messages, set the user_input.max_characters (default value 420 characters).

Fine-tuning an LLM for Command Generation#

Fine-tuning is a process where a pre-trained language model is further trained on a specific dataset to enhance its performance for a particular task or domain. This allows the model to adapt to specific needs and nuances that are not covered by general training data used during the initial pre-training phase.

Using the fine-tuning recipe you can fine-tune a base language model for the particular task of command generation with your data.

Why Fine-Tuning?#

The key motivation behind incorporating fine-tuning into CALM is to address critical issues like high latency, low reliability, and reliance on proprietary LLMs like GPT-4:

1. Improved Latency and Performance: By fine-tuning and deploying a smaller, more efficient LLM on-premises or in a controlled cloud environment, we can significantly reduce the inference time, thus improving speed and responsiveness.

2. Enhanced Reliability: By self-deploying a fine-tuned LLM, we can ensure greater control over model's operation and performance, thus enhancing reliability even during peak usage times.

3. Cost Efficiency: Fine-tuning a small LLM in-house provides a cost-effective alternative without compromising on performance, thereby offering a better balance between cost and accuracy.

4. Strategic Benefits: Adopting the fine-tuning recipe empowers you to fully customize and control your language models, enhancing security and compliance.

Refer to the conceptual details of how the fine-tuning recipe works to understand what happens under the hood and once you are familiar with the details, refer to the user guide that walks you through every step of the recipe in practice.