Weights & Biases - Measure and iterate on AI application performance using W&B Weave
Weights and Biases' Weave tool is designed to evaluate AI applications by tracking every data point and organizing inputs, outputs, code, and metadata. This process is crucial for developing production-ready AI applications, especially since LLMs are non-deterministic and unpredictable. Weave allows developers to measure the impact of updates across multiple dimensions such as accuracy, latency, cost, safety, and user experience. This leads to more consistent and desirable results, increasing confidence in AI applications.
The tool requires three components for evaluation: the application, data sets for performance assessment, and scores for performance metrics. Weave stores these components, making them easily accessible with minimal code. The tool includes built-in scores for common metrics like hallucination detection and allows for custom score creation. Evaluations can be compared across different models, providing insights into trade-offs between metrics like latency and accuracy. This comprehensive evaluation process helps refine and optimize AI applications, ensuring they are ready for production deployment.
Key Points:
- Weave tracks and organizes all relevant data for AI application evaluation, ensuring consistent outputs.
- It measures updates' impact on accuracy, latency, cost, safety, and user experience.
- The tool requires an application, data sets, and performance scores for evaluation.
- Weave includes built-in scores and allows for custom score creation.
- Evaluations can be compared across models to understand trade-offs and optimize applications.
Details:
1. 🎙️ Introduction to AI Evaluation
1.1. 🎙️ Importance of AI Evaluation
1.2. 🎙️ Role of Weave in AI Evaluation
2. 🛠️ Developing a Prototype Support Agent
- The prototype support agent is currently designed to address general questions related to returns and customer support issues.
- It lacks the capability to access individual customer purchase histories, which limits its effectiveness in providing personalized support.
- While the agent can provide information about the store's return policy, it cannot assist with specific inquiries, such as details related to a recent laptop purchase.
- To improve, future iterations could integrate purchase history access to enhance personalized customer support, potentially increasing customer satisfaction and retention.
3. 🔍 Analyzing Customer Interaction Data
- Interaction traces show dynamic exchanges between customers and support agents, highlighting areas for engagement improvement.
- Metrics such as tokens, cost, latency, and trace size offer critical insights into the efficiency and resource utilization of interactions, enabling targeted enhancements to customer service systems.
- Detailed analysis of trace trees, inputs, outputs, metadata, and code provides a foundation for strategic development in customer interaction platforms.
- Building demos and prototypes is easy; however, transitioning to production requires additional features and thorough evaluations, ensuring support agents are equipped to handle complex inquiries efficiently.
4. 📝 Setting Up Comprehensive Weave Evaluations
- A Weave evaluation requires three components: an application, data, and scores. The application can range from a simple single LLM call to a complex multi-step deep research workflow.
- The data consists of question and answer datasets used to assess application performance.
- Performance metrics scores are used to measure application effectiveness.
- These components can be introduced via Python or TypeScript code and stored in Weave for easy access with a single line of code.
- The integration of these components allows for a seamless assessment of application performance, facilitating iterative improvements based on concrete metrics.
- Implementing these elements in Weave ensures that evaluations are robust, scalable, and easily repeatable, enhancing strategic decision-making and application refinement.
5. 📊 Exploring Models, Data Management, and Scoring Systems
- AI applications are stored in version control, enabling traceability by providing a history of every instance a model has been used. This ensures that all changes can be tracked, allowing for accountability and efficient debugging.
- Data management systems support easy manipulation of datasets, including adding, editing, or deleting rows, which streamlines the process of preparing data for evaluations. Instructions are provided for utilizing these datasets effectively in evaluations.
- Scoring systems incorporate both human and programmatic scores, offering comprehensive instructions for their application and maintaining a history of previous evaluations. This dual approach ensures balanced and thorough assessment of AI models.
- The system is designed with flexibility in mind, offering built-in scores for common tasks while accommodating third-party or custom scoring integrations. This adaptability allows for tailored evaluation methods that meet specific project needs.
- Custom scores and LLM-powered applications can be rapidly developed and assessed using Python, showcasing the platform's capacity for quick prototyping and performance measurement. This feature empowers developers to innovate and iterate efficiently.
6. 🔧 Constructing and Scoring AI Applications with Weave
- Starting with Weave requires a single line of code to record all application inputs, outputs, metadata, and code, simplifying the process significantly.
- The retail support agent class is equipped with essential properties and functions, including a mechanism to retrieve RAG content and an API call to the LLM, ensuring comprehensive data handling and processing.
- A Python dictionary is utilized to store the LLM response, initial question, and context, allowing for seamless reuse of published Weave models with minimal effort.
- The system prompt's role is demonstrated through a practical example involving store return policies, showcasing its utility in real-world applications.
- Three distinct evaluation scores are utilized: a built-in hallucination-free score to ensure accuracy, a custom friendliness score to maintain positive user interaction, and a returnable score to validate support agent decisions against actual data.
- The hallucination-free score is customizable, instantiated with a model ID and column mapping to fit specific needs, ensuring application reliability.
- The friendliness score leverages an LLM for qualitative assessment, grading responses on politeness and positivity to enhance customer satisfaction.
- The returnable score employs a boolean check against return eligibility data, providing a robust mechanism for verifying the validity of support decisions.
- An evaluation array consisting of four LLMs is easily constructed, illustrating the flexibility and scalability of Weave in handling multiple applications.
- The evaluation process, streamlined by executing the evaluate call, facilitates comprehensive assessment, with detailed results accessible on the Weave evaluations page, aiding in strategic decision-making.
7. 🔍 Evaluating, Comparing, and Optimizing Results
- The evaluation process in Weave allows for a detailed analysis of each input and output, offering aggregated data metrics for comprehensive insights and individual traces for specific questions.
- Visual charts on the compare evaluation page facilitate detailed comparisons of evaluated LLMs, highlighting strengths and weaknesses across various metrics.
- Different LLMs prove competitive in several areas, necessitating strategic trade-offs, such as between latency and accuracy, during optimization.
- The Gemini model stands out for its low latency and high friendliness scores, although it still shows some hallucination, indicating areas for further improvement.
- Weave provides tools for ongoing optimization and iteration based on evaluation results, enabling teams to refine models continually.
- Optimization strategies may prioritize specific metrics like accuracy over cost, depending on deployment needs, illustrating the importance of context-specific decision-making.
8. 🤖 Final Thoughts and Enhanced Application Performance
- Implementing Weave Evaluations leads to more informative and congenial customer conversations, enhancing overall customer interaction.
- The application now efficiently provides a list of recently purchased items and offers readiness to assist, significantly improving customer experience and satisfaction.
- Users are encouraged to sign up for Weave to confidently build and deploy AI applications, potentially improving AI adoption rates and innovation.