Specifications: The missing link to making the development of LLM systems an engineering discipline

Autor: Stoica, Ion, Zaharia, Matei, Gonzalez, Joseph, Goldberg, Ken, Zhang, Hao, Angelopoulos, Anastasios, Patil, Shishir G., Chen, Lingjiao, Chiang, Wei-Lin, Davis, Jared Q.
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
Popis: Despite the significant strides made by generative AI in just a few short years, its future progress is constrained by the challenge of building modular and robust systems. This capability has been a cornerstone of past technological revolutions, which relied on combining components to create increasingly sophisticated and reliable systems. Cars, airplanes, computers, and software consist of components-such as engines, wheels, CPUs, and libraries-that can be assembled, debugged, and replaced. A key tool for building such reliable and modular systems is specification: the precise description of the expected behavior, inputs, and outputs of each component. However, the generality of LLMs and the inherent ambiguity of natural language make defining specifications for LLM-based components (e.g., agents) both a challenging and urgent problem. In this paper, we discuss the progress the field has made so far-through advances like structured outputs, process supervision, and test-time compute-and outline several future directions for research to enable the development of modular and reliable LLM-based systems through improved specifications.
Databáze: arXiv