Taming the Unpredictable - How Continuous Alignment Testing Keeps LLMs in Check

Jul 5

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI applications, bringing unprecedented natural language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their responses can often be unpredictable, turning a seamless user experience into a rollercoaster of inconsistent interactions. Picture this: a minor tweak in an LLM prompt dramatically changes the outcome, leading to results that swing wildly and potentially leave users frustrated and disengaged.

Inconsistent AI behavior doesn't just tarnish user experiences—it can also have significant business implications. For companies relying on accurate and predictable interactions within their applications, this non-determinism can translate into customer dissatisfaction, eroded trust, and, ultimately, lost revenue. Thus, the urgent need for dependable testing methods becomes clear.

To address these challenges, at Artium, we employ Continuous Alignment Testing—a systematic approach to testing and validating the consistency of LLM responses. At the heart of this approach lies a powerful technique: Repeat Tests. By running the same tests multiple times and analyzing aggregate results, Repeat Tests ensure that applications deliver reliable performance, even under varying conditions.

To illustrate the effectiveness of Continuous Alignment Testing, we'll delve into my Amazon Treasure Chat project. This conversational AI is designed to assist users with product queries, providing reliable and accurate information. For instance, a typical user interaction might ask, "I have a particular motherboard - a Gigabyte H410M S2H - can you suggest some compatible RAM?" To ensure the system's reliability, all returned results must include an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), and each ASIN listed must be present in the original dataset. The test can be found here.

Throughout this article, we'll explore the implementation and benefits of Continuous Alignment Testing, the role of seed values and choices, and practical testing steps using Repeat Tests for Amazon Treasure Chat. We'll also look ahead to future strategies for refining AI testing, ensuring that your LLM-based applications remain reliable and effective in the real world.

Join me as we unpack the methodologies that help tame LLMs' unpredictability, ensuring they deliver consistent, dependable results that meet user expectations and business needs.

Implementing Continuous Alignment Testing

To effectively manage the unpredictability of LLM responses, we have developed Continuous Alignment Testing. This approach systematically tests and validates the consistency of LLM outputs by leveraging Repeat Tests. The main objectives of Continuous Alignment Testing are to:

Ensure high consistency and reliability in AI applications.
Capture and address varied responses to maintain robust performance under different conditions.
Provide a quantitative measure of success through repeated test analysis.

Steps to Setup Repeat Tests

We approach Continuous Alignment Testing similarly to test-driven development (TDD), aiming to implement test cases and assumptions before fully developing our prompts. This proactive stance allows us to define our expectations early on and adjust our development process accordingly.

1. Define Known Inputs and Expected Outcomes

Step 1: Identify the task or query the LLM will handle. For Amazon Treasure Chat, an example input might be, "I have a particular motherboard - a Gigabyte H410M S2H - can you suggest some compatible RAM?"
Step 2: Establish clear criteria for successful responses. For this example, expected outcomes include responses containing ASINs that match known compatible RAM in the original dataset.
Step 3: Formulate concrete scenarios and vague ideas to cover various cases. For instance, a general goal might be maintaining the original tone of the prompt output, accounting for phrases such as "Talk to me like a pirate."

2. Automate Test Execution Using CI Tools

Step 1: Integrate your testing framework with continuous integration (CI) tools like GitHub Actions. These tools automate the test execution process, ensuring consistency and saving time.
Step 2: Set up a job in GitHub Actions that trigger your Repeat Tests whenever changes are made to the prompt or tangentially related things—like tool calls, temperature, and data.

3. Define Acceptance Thresholds

Step 1: Run the automated tests multiple times to gather sufficient data. Running the test 10 times might be adequate during development, while pre-production could require 100 runs.
Step 2: Analyze the aggregate results to determine the pass rate. Establish an acceptance threshold, such as 80%. If 8 out of 10 tests pass, the system meets the threshold and can move forward.

Aggregate and Analyze Test Results

1. Collect Test Data

Step 1: Use logging and reporting tools to capture the outcomes of each test run. Ensure that the data includes both successful and failed responses for comprehensive analysis.
Step 2: Aggregate the data to provide an overall system performance view across all test runs.

2. Perform Statistical Analysis

Step 1: Calculate the pass rate by dividing the number of successful test runs by the total number of runs.
Step 2: Identify patterns in failure cases to understand common issues. This analysis helps prioritize fixes and enhancements.

3. Refine and Iterate

Step 1: Based on the analysis, iterate on the prompts or underlying model configurations. Gradually improve the reliability and consistency of responses.
Step 2: Repeat the testing process to ensure the changes have achieved the desired improvements without introducing new issues.

Example Workflow for Amazon Treasure Chat

Following the steps outlined above, here is an example workflow:

1. Define the prompt and expected outcome.
 2. Implement automated tests using GitHub Actions.
 3. Set an acceptance threshold and run the tests multiple times.
 4. Analyze the results and refine the prompt as necessary.
 5. Iterate and repeat the tests to ensure continuous alignment.

By setting up Continuous Alignment Testing with Repeat Tests, we can systematically address the unpredictability of LLM responses, ensuring that our applications remain reliable and performant. This proactive approach, akin to Test Driven Development, allows us to anticipate and solve issues early, building a more robust AI system from the ground up.

Incorporating Seed Values for Consistency

Incorporating seed values is a powerful technique for taming the unpredictable nature of LLM responses. It ensures tests are consistent and reproducible, stabilizing otherwise non-deterministic outputs. When dealing with LLMs, slight alterations in prompts can result in significantly different outcomes. Seed values help control this variability by providing a consistent starting point for the LLLM'spseudo-random number generator. This means that using the same seed with the same prompt will yield the same response every time, making our tests reliable and repeatable.

The benefits of using seed values in testing are manifold. First, they help achieve reproducible outcomes, which is crucial for validating the AI's performance under different conditions. We can confidently predict the results by embedding seeds in our tests, ensuring the AI behaves consistently. Second, seeds facilitate automated testing. With predictable results, each test run becomes comparable, enabling us to quickly identify genuine improvements or regressions in the system's behavior.

The workflow involves a few straightforward steps. We start by choosing an appropriate seed value for the test. Then, we implement the test with this seed, running it multiple times to ensure consistent responses. Finally, we analyze the collected results to verify that the AI's outputs meet our expected criteria. This allows us to move forward confidently, knowing our system performs reliably under predefined conditions.

Using seed values enhances the stability of our testing processes and speeds up execution. We can quickly identify and resolve inconsistencies by enabling multiple scenario tests in parallel. However, selecting representative seed values that simulate real-world scenarios is crucial, ensuring the test results are meaningful and reliable.

Incorporating seed values transforms our Continuous Alignment Testing into a robust system that assures the reliability and predictability of LLM outputs. This consistency is vital for maintaining high-quality AI-driven applications. By leveraging such techniques, we build trust and reliability, which are essential for any AI application aiming to deliver consistent user performance.

Leveraging Choices for Efficient Testing

Another powerful feature in OpenAI Chat Completions that can significantly enhance your testing process is the ability to request multiple answers—or "choices" from a single query. Think of it like hitting the "regenerate" button several times in the ChatGPT web interface, but all at once. This capability allows us to validate changes to prompts, tool calls, or data more effectively and cost-efficiently.

When you use the choices feature, you ask the LLM to provide several responses to the same query in one go. This is particularly useful for testing because it gives you a broader view of how stable and variable your LLM's outputs are, all from a single API call. Typically, each query to the API has a cost based on the number of tokens processed. Increasing the number of choices consolidates multiple responses into one call, which helps keep costs down.

For instance, consider our Amazon Treasure Chat example where a typical query might be, "I have a particular motherboard - a Gigabyte H410M S2H - can you suggest some compatible RAM?" By setting a higher number of choices, the system can generate multiple RAM suggestions in just one execution. This provides a more comprehensive dataset to analyze, showing how the AI performs under varied but controlled conditions.

In practice, setting up the choices feature is straightforward. Determine how many results you want from each query. This might depend on your specific testing needs, but having several responses at once allows you to see a range of outputs and evaluate them against your criteria for success. Implementing this in your CI pipeline, like GitHub Actions, can streamline your workflow by automatically handling multiple responses from a single call.

The choices feature makes the testing process faster and much cheaper. Instead of running several queries and paying for each one, a single call with multiple choices reduces the total cost. It's like getting more bang for your buck—or, in this case, more answers for fewer potatoes.

Currently, this feature is available in OpenAI Chat Completions but not yet in the Assistant API, which is still in beta. However, we anticipate that such a valuable feature will likely be included in future updates of the Assistant API.

Using the choices feature effectively bridges the gap between thorough testing and cost efficiency. It allows for a deeper understanding of the AI's variability and helps ensure that your prompts, tool interactions, and data models perform as expected. Combined with our Continuous Alignment Testing approach, this boosts the overall reliability and robustness of AI-driven applications.

Use Case: Amazon Treasure Chat

To appreciate the impact of Continuous Alignment Testing, let's explore its application in Amazon Treasure Chat, a conversational AI designed to assist users with product queries. Ensuring accurate and reliable information in real time is critical. For instance, a common question might be, "I have a particular motherboard - a Gigabyte H410M S2H - can you suggest some compatible RAM?" Here, we need to ensure every response includes relevant product suggestions with their Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) verified against our dataset of compatible RAM.

We begin by clearly defining inputs and expected outcomes. In this case, the input is the user's query about compatible RAM, while the expected result is a list of RAM options, each with an ASIN that matches known compatible products. This setup forms the foundation for Continuous Alignment Testing using Repeat Tests.

Integration with continuous integration (CI) tools like GitHub Actions automates the testing process, running our Repeat Tests whenever changes are made to the codebase or prompts. Automation allows us to swiftly identify and address AI performance fluctuations, maintaining system reliability. We may run the tests ten times during initial development to catch early inconsistencies. As we edge towards a production release, this number could rise to 100 or more, ensuring robustness. Each test run is meticulously logged, and the results are aggregated to calculate a pass rate.

Consider running the compatible RAM query 100 times. If the AI correctly returns the expected ASINs 80 out of those 100 times, we achieve an 80% pass rate, meeting our predefined acceptance threshold for reliability. This quantitative measure is crucial, providing a clear benchmark for deployment readiness.

We systematically address the challenges of non-deterministic LLM responses through Continuous Alignment Testing, incorporating repeat tests. This rigorous process ensures that Amazon Treasure Chat meets and exceeds user expectations, delivering reliable and accurate information. By iteratively refining our system based on test outcomes, we build a resilient and robust AI, enhancing user satisfaction and maintaining high-performance standards. This is essential for ensuring that AI-driven applications like Amazon Treasure Chat consistently operate at their best.

Refining Testing Strategies

As we refine our testing strategies, we must consider expanding our approach beyond prompt testing to ensure comprehensive coverage of all AI system interactions. Continuous Alignment Testing has proven effective in validating prompt reliability. Still, we can enhance this by incorporating tests for other critical elements of AI products, such as API calls and function interactions.

One of the first steps in refining our strategy is to extend our tests to cover the core functionalities of the AI system. This includes testing how the AI handles tool calls, interacts with external APIs, and processes inputs and outputs. By developing tests for these interactions, we can ensure the system operates smoothly and reliably, not just specific prompt responses. For instance, Amazon Treasure Chat might involve testing how the AI retrieves product information from external databases or integrates with other services to provide comprehensive responses.

Adapting our testing framework to accommodate these broader elements requires careful planning and integration. We must define clear criteria for success in these areas, much like we did for prompt responses. This means identifying the expected behavior for API calls and tool interactions and ensuring our tests can validate these outcomes. Automation remains crucial here, as it allows us to continuously monitor and assess these aspects under various conditions and scenarios.

Looking ahead, we aim to enhance our collaboration with clients to help them overcome the 70% success barrier often encountered in AI implementations. Our experience indicates that applying Test Driven Development (TDD) principles to AI can deliver results exponentially faster than manual testing. Integrating Continuous Alignment Testing early in the development process ensures that any changes to prompts, AI functions, or data are thoroughly validated before deployment. This proactive approach minimizes the risk of introducing errors and inconsistencies, thus boosting the overall reliability of the AI system.

In addition, staying ahead of developments in AI technology is crucial. As the OpenAI Assistant API evolves, we anticipate new features will further enhance our testing capabilities. Keeping abreast of these changes and incorporating them into our testing framework will allow us to improve our AI systems' robustness and efficiency continuously.

Ultimately, we aim to provide clients with AI applications that meet their immediate needs, scale, and adapt seamlessly to future developments. By refining our testing strategies and leveraging advanced techniques like Continuous Alignment Testing, we can ensure that our AI-driven solutions remain at the forefront of technological innovation, delivering consistent and reliable performance.

Conclusion

Ensuring the reliability and consistency of LLM-based systems is a critical aspect of building trustworthy AI applications. We've delved into Continuous Alignment Testing, a methodology that leverages Repeat Tests, seed values, and the choices feature in OpenAI Chat Completions to manage the unpredictability of LLM responses. Our case study of Amazon Treasure Chat demonstrates how these techniques can be practically applied to ensure robust and accurate AI performance.

Continuous Alignment Testing begins with a proactive approach akin to Test Driven Development (TDD), where test cases and assumptions are defined early in the development process. This sets clear expectations and success criteria, creating a solid foundation for reliable AI performance. Repeat Tests validate these expectations across multiple runs, addressing the inherent variability in LLM outputs.

Seed values play a crucial role by ensuring reproducibility and stabilizing responses to make issue detection and system refinement easier. The choices feature further enhances testing efficiency and cost-effectiveness by allowing multiple reactions in a single query. Together, these techniques help deliver dependable AI-driven applications.

In Amazon Treasure Chat, we saw how these methodologies ensure the system meets high standards and consistently provides accurate information to users. By rigorously running tests, analyzing outcomes, and iterating based on findings, we build resilient AI systems that users can trust. Moving forward, our strategy includes expanding testing to cover all core elements of AI systems, such as API calls and tool interactions, further solidifying our approach.

Refining these methodologies, staying updated with technological advancements, and collaborating closely with clients will help us deliver AI solutions that are not only reliable today but also adaptable and scalable for the future. The journey to manage AI unpredictability is ongoing, but with rigorous testing and continuous improvement, we can ensure our AI applications consistently perform at their best.

Continuous Alignment Testing and the methodologies discussed provide a roadmap for achieving high-reliability standards in AI systems. By adopting these practices, you can ensure your LLM-based applications are practical and dependable, offering superior user experiences and maintaining strong business integrity.

We invite you to embrace these testing techniques and join us in pursuing excellence in AI development. Doing so will enhance your AI applications' performance and increase user confidence and satisfaction.

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Justin Beall

Taming the Unpredictable - How Continuous Alignment Testing Keeps LLMs in Check