[Feature]: Make outlines dependency optional

[saattrupdan]

🚀 The feature, motivation and pitch

I'm using a newer version of outlines than v0.0.34, and my application needs the fixes implemented in newer versions of that package. It would be great if vllm could make its structured generation dependencies optional, as I'm not using the internal vllm structured generation, but rather using the logits processors from outlines directly.

Alternatives

No response

Additional context

This prevents me from updating to vllm==0.4.0.

[simon-mo]

Alternatively we can relax the outlines version to not to pin it or set it >=v0.0.34. That will be an even easier fix at the moment :D.

Once we have multiple guided decoding backends I think the packages can be optional.

[saattrupdan]

Alternatively we can relax the outlines version to not to pin it or set it >=v0.0.34. That will be an even easier fix at the moment :D.

That could work! However, note that some of the imports from outlines (RegexFSM for instance) is currently deprecated and will be removed in June, causing ImportErrors in vLLM if nothing changes. But it would at least work until then :)

A quick hotfix could maybe be to relax the versioning and move the outlines imports in guided_logits_processors.py into the classes, to avoid problems if you aren't using that module?

[simon-mo]

The update ticket: #3715

[github-actions]

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[saattrupdan]

@simon-mo An upper bound on outlines was re-introduced in #6262, and I am relying on newer outlines versions. Since I don't use the vllm-outlines integration at all (I just use the logits processors from outlines), I'd raise my initial question again: Can we please make the outlines dependency of vLLM optional?

[chris-aeviator]

@simon-mo An upper bound on outlines was re-introduced in #6262, and I am relying on newer outlines versions. Since I don't use the vllm-outlines integration at all (I just use the logits processors from outlines), I'd raise my initial question again: Can we please make the outlines dependency of vLLM optional?

can't agree more - using this antique version of outlines breaks all my dependency management. This should be discouraged within vllm PR reviews.

[mgoin]

We will support the latest versions of outlines with this PR #10576