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FlexEval LLM Evals

FlexEval is a tool for designing custom metrics, completion functions, and LLM-graded rubrics for evaluating the behavior of LLM-powered systems.

We describe this in more detail in our paper, located in the root of the repo.

Why?

To make evaluations easier for LLM-powered systems.

Thoroughly evaluating LLMs is difficult and best-practices are rapidly developing. While it is not yet clear how to guarantee the behavior of LLM-powered systems, we can absolutely increase visibility into their behavior. Which features are important depends on the application, but might include:

  • safety
  • verbosity
  • use of emojis
  • text complexity and reading ease
  • appropriateness of function calling
  • other things we haven't thought of

The most common method of evaluating LLMs is to prompt them and compare their responses to "ideal" responses. This is necessary for many applications, but is not sufficient to cover the cases above. Moreover, we're confident that as users continue to develop LLM-powered applications, they will desire to collect metrics of their own devising to quantify and track the behavior of these applications during development and in production.

With this in mind, we've created a tool that makes it easier to write custom metrics on conversations and completions.

What?

FlexEval is a tool for writing metrics that produce quantitative metrics on conversational data.

Inputs:

  • historical conversations
  • Python functions that convert conversations and conversational turns into numbers
  • configurations for LLMs you would like to test

Process:

  • (optional) generate conversational completions using an LLM or LLM-powered system
  • apply each Python function to each conversation/turn/completion

Outputs:

  • json files
  • entries in a SQLite database that can be queried

How

FlexEval evaluates Python functions and machine-graded rubrics on each turn

FlexEval began as an extension to OpenAI Evals, making it easier to use. It is now independent of OpenAI Evals and offers several usability improvements:

  1. Whereas OpenAI Evals requires users to write a new class with inheritance to define new completion functions (a generic term to a function that accepts a conversation or prompt and produces a response), FlexEval allows users to define this using a function in configuration/completion_functions.py.
  2. Whereas OpenAI Evals requires users to create a new class with inheritance to define a new metric type, FlexEval allows users to do this by writing a function in configuration/function_metrics.py.
  3. FlexEval makes it easy to use any LLM as a rubric-based grader.
  4. FlexEval makes it easy to write test suites, that is, sets of multiple metrics to be evaluated against the same dataset of conversations.
  5. FlexEval allows metrics to be computed over entire conversations (i.e. how many turns are in this conversation), conversations faceted by role (how many turns per role are in this conversation), or individual turns faceted by role (what is the length of each string), and then aggregated (what is the average length of text output produced by the user vs the assistant).

$${\color{red}\textsf{WARNING: FlexEval is under early and active development. The following README will change frequently.}}$$

$${\color{red}\textsf{Expect breaking changes. We will establish a versioning system soon.}}$$

Running

Prior to running, the tool needs to be configured to meet your needs. This includes telling it how to connect to the LLM you want to test, and telling it which tests you want to run.

Configuration

Step 0: Clone this repo

Step 1: Environment file

  • Copy .env-example to make a new file called .env.

Step 2: Install the virtual envirionment. Run:

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Step 3: Data

  • Write your data to the data/test-cases directory - or elsewhere - as a file in jsonl format. Each exchange between assistant and user should be one line of the file. The format of each line is JSON, with an input key, and a corresponding value that consists of a list of turns like the following:

    {"input": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hi, Nice to meet you!"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Nice to meet you, too! How can I help you today?"}]}

Step 4a (optional):

  • Edit configuration/function_metrics.py to include any additional function metrics. These functions can process either a single conversational turn or an entire conversation. To better understand the input and output options for these functions, see function templates in configuration/completion_functions.py.

Step 4b (optional):

  • Edit configuration/rubric_metrics.yaml as desired. Rubrics in this file will be used to evaluate conversations and completions using "chain-of-thoughts then classify" (COT classify) and will report a numeric score (e.g., 0 or 1) mapped to a choice string (e.g.,"Yes", "No") from the classification results. For more information on how to write and use rubrics in FlexEval, check doc/rubric_metric_guidelines.md in this repo.

Step 4c (optional):

  • Edit configuration/completion_functions.py as desired. These functions accept a conversation_history and model_name (at minimum) and return a completion, that is, the next turn in the conversation.

Step 5:

  • Define a test suite in evals.yaml. A test suite includes:
  • an input dataset in data/test-cases or another location -- the path should be present in the data entry of evals.yaml.
  • a list of function metrics to use for scoring (can be blank). These functions must all be defined in configuration/function_metrics.py. These have an additional key called score, which can have values completion or all_by_role. The value completion will elicit a completion from the LLM specified in the completions section of the suite and calculate a metric for that only. The all_by_role will calculate a metric value for every existing turn in the conversation, and then the aggregation will be done by role.
  • a list of rubric metrics to use for scoring (can be blank). These must all be defined in configuration/rubric_metrics.yaml.
  • an LLM to use for rubric-based grading. Currently only OpenAI models are supported.
  • an LLM to use for completions, and associated required parameters. This is the connetion with the LLM system you would like to test. The configuration options specified here will be passed as arguments to the associated function in configuration/completion_functions.py.

Running tests

FlexEval is a Python program. We will support use via Docker in the future.

To run, clone this repo and run:

source venv/bin/activate
cd src/llm-evals
python main.py YOUR_EVAL_NAME

where YOUR_EVAL_NAME is the name of the evaluation suite in evals.yaml that you want to run.

This will run the set of evaluations against the dataset you provided. Results will be stored in two places. Data will be saved in table form in the data/results/results.db sqlite file.

You can re-run evaluations as needed.

Interpreting results

A "run" consists of a single metric calculated on a single dataset. Metrics are calculated for each conversation in that dataset.

You can query the database in data/results/results.db to analyze the evaluation results.

Pre-installed functionality

This tool is intended to be somewhat "batteries included". It supports the following out-of-the-box:

  • scoring historical conversations - useful for monitoring live systems.
  • scoring LLMs:
  • locally hosted and served via an endpoint using something like LM Studio
  • LLMs accessible by a REST endpoint and accessible via a network call
  • any OpenAI LLM
  • a set of included rubrics
  • a set of included metrics calculated as Python files

This list will grow as we add functionality to meet LEVI team needs.