Optimizing the Performance of LLMs Using a Continuous Evaluation Solution

7 min readMar 14, 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are positively changing how we build applications because of their ability to process natural languages efficiently as both text and media data. The capabilities of LLMs include text generation, media generation, complex text summary, data processing and code generation, etc. Applications today are integrating LLMs for increased efficiency and productivity. For example, some applications use LLMs to automate repetitive tasks like content creation. Apps that rely heavily on LLMs are called LLM-based applications. While the benefits of LLMs are enormous, it is important to understand the potential risks and drawbacks associated with their use to continuously monitor, safeguard, and optimize their performance.

Because LLMs are constantly evolving, LLM-based apps must continuously validate their models to prevent deviation and anomalies. Large language models may sometimes deviate significantly from prompt instructions and generate factually inaccurate and context-inconsistent outputs — this is known as model hallucination and can negatively impact the performance of your application in production if not prevented.

An LLM evaluation solution can help you identify pitfalls in your model by continuously validating it throughout the lifecycle of your application — from testing to production. Continuous validation and evaluation of LLMs help to optimize their performance, catch deviations on time, prevent hallucination, and protect users from toxic output and privacy leaks.

This article delves into the details of optimizing the performance of LLMs using an LLM evaluation solution. We will explore the benefits of continuous LLM evaluation for LLM-based applications, discuss the available tools for LLM evaluation & their features, and do a demo evaluating real-world data to detect deviation, weakness, toxicity, and bias in model outputs and remediate them using one of the LLM evaluation solutions.

Benefits of Continuous LLM Evaluation

Continuous evaluation of LLMs has enormous benefits for both developers and end users. LLM evaluation helps developers and product owners understand how their model responds to user inputs, identify weak segments, and optimize performance. It can also help prevent toxicity, improve the accuracy of outputs, and prevent personally identifiable information (PII) leaks.

The following are some of the benefits of LLM evaluation in detail:

Identify the model’s strengths and weaknesses: Evaluation helps you understand the strengths of your model — the topics they generate the most accurate output for, the inputs with the most coherent outputs, etc. It also identifies the weak areas in your model’s output that need optimizing. LLM evaluation can help improve the overall performance of your LLM.
Reduce bias and ensure safety: Continuous evaluation ensures model safety and fairness for users of all demographic groups by identifying and mitigating biases in LLMs’ training data and output. LLM evaluation can help you detect stereotypes and discriminatory behaviors in LLM outputs and ensure safety, fairness, and inclusivity for your users.
Improve accuracy: You can improve the accuracy of output generated by your LLM if you can measure how well it understands user inputs. LLM evaluation validates your model and provides a calculated metric for accuracy.
Toxicity detection: Evaluating your LLMs can help detect toxicity. LLM evaluation engines have toxicity detection models that measure the model’s ability to distinguish between harmful and benign languages.
Prevent hallucination: LLMs may generate contextually inconsistent and factually inaccurate texts for reasons like language ambiguity, insufficient training data, and biases in training data. Evaluation can help identify and mitigate hallucinations.
Prevent privacy leaks: LLMs may leak personally identifiable information (PII) from engineered prompts. PII is sensitive data, such as social security numbers, phone numbers, and a social media handle, that can be used to identify a person. Continuous LLM evaluation can help identify leakage vulnerabilities and mitigate risks.
Early detection of deviations: Evaluation can detect deviations and anomalies in model output.
Benchmarking: Evaluated LLMs can be compared with others, allowing for an objective assessment of their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Tools for LLM Evaluation and Their Features

While building your own LLM Evaluation solution in-house might seem appealing, it is however difficult to build a solution that is robust, comprehensive, and efficient to do a thorough analysis and validation of LLMs. Leveraging existing LLMOps tools for LLM evaluation offers significant advantages. The evaluation tools in this section are all open-source and can be self-hosted on your environment.

Let’s look at some tools for LLM evaluation and their features.

FiddlerAI

FiddlerAI specializes in AI observability, providing ML engineers the platform to monitor, explain, analyze, and evaluate machine learning models and generative AI models. As an open-source model performance management (MPM) platform, FiddlerAI monitors model performance using specific key performance indicators, detects bias, and provides actionable insights to improve performance & model safety.

LLM-based applications can leverage FiddlerAI to optimize the performance of their model, build trust in their AI pipeline, and identify weaknesses in their model before reaching production and in real time.

Key features of FiddlerAI:

LLM Performance Monitoring: FiddlerAI tracks the performance of deployed LLMs in real-time, providing real-time insights and assessment of the model’s performance — identify and fix degradation.
Model Explainability: FiddlerAI provides explainability for large language models, helping you understand how your models arrive at their outputs and identify biases.
Model Analytics: Understand the impact of ineffective models on your business through insightful analytics provided by FiddlerAI. Track down the point of failure within your model, compare model performance metrics, and take corrective actions using data from model analytics.
MLOps Integration: FiddlerAI is seamlessly integrable with other MLOps tools. It supports integration with LangChain and allows custom evaluation metrics.
Responsible AI: FiddlerAI provides resources to help develop and deploy responsible and ethical models.

Deepchecks LLM Evaluation

Deepchecks LLM Evaluation is an open-source tool for validating AI & ML models throughout their lifecycles. Deepchecks LLM Evaluation engine continuously monitors and evaluates your LLM pipeline to ensure your models perform optimally. It measures the quality of each model interaction using properties like coherence, toxicity, fluency, correctness, etc. It also supports custom properties and allows you to customize the configuration file of the LLM evaluation engine.

Deepchecks evaluate both accuracy and model safety from experimentation to production. The engine continuously evaluates your LLM and provides real-time monitoring using measurable metrics to ensure that your models perform well at all times.

Key features of Deepchecks LLM Evaluation:

Flexible Testing: Deepchecks LLM Evaluation allows you to test your LLM by providing a Golden Set data as the base for evaluating your LLM pipeline.
Performance Monitoring: It also monitors your model’s performance in production and alerts you for deviations, drifts, or anomalies.
Annotation Insights: Deepchecks LLM Evaluation engine analyzes LLM interactions and annotates them as good, bad, or unknown based on the quality of the interaction.
Properties Scoring: Deepchecks evaluate properties such as coherence, fluency, relevance, grounded in context, avoided answer, etc., and provide a calculated score for each.
Segment Analysis: Deepchecks helps identify weak segments in your LLM pipeline, allowing you to know where your model underperforms.
Version Comparison: Version comparison is useful for root cause analysis and regression testing.

EvidentlyAI

EvidentlyAI is an open-source Python library for evaluating, testing, and monitoring machine learning models throughout their lifecycle — experimentation to production. It helps to ensure that your model is reliable, effective, and free from bias. EvidentlyAI works with text data, vector embeddings, and tabular data.

Key features of EvidentlyAI:

Test Suites: Create automated test suites to assess data drifts and regression performance. EvidentlyAI performs model and data checks, and returns an explicit pass or fail.
Performance Visualization: EvidentlyAI renders rich visualizations of ML metrics, making it easy to understand your model’s performance. Alternatively, you can retrieve performance reports as HTML, JSON, Python dictionary, or EvidentlyAI JSON snapshot.
Model Monitoring Dashboard: EvidentlyAI provides a centralized dashboard that you can self-host for monitoring model performance and detecting changes in real time.

Giskard

Like EvidentlyAI, Giskard is a Python library for detecting performance degradation, privacy leaks, hallucination, security issues, and other vulnerabilities in AI models. It is easy to use, requiring only a few lines of code to set up. However, Giskard is limited in features compared to Fiddler AI and Deepchecks LLM Evaluation. It is not a robust solution.

Key features of Giskard:

Advanced Test Suite Generation: Giskard can automatically generate test suites based on the vulnerability detected in your model. You can also debug your models and diagnose failed tests.
Model Comparison: Compare the performance of your models and make data-driven decisions.
Test Hub: Giskard fosters effective team collaboration by providing a place to gather tests and collaborate.
LLM Monitoring: Giskards prevents hallucination, toxicity, and harmful responses by continuously monitoring your models. It also provides insights to optimize model performance.

Demo: Evaluating Real World Data With an LLM Evaluation Tool

Next, we will evaluate sample data using Deepchecks LLM Evaluation — one of the LLM evaluation tools discussed earlier.

Continue to read: https://semaphoreci.com/blog/llms-continuous-evaluation

Originally published at https://semaphoreci.com on March 14, 2024.