🤔 OpenAI's latest structured outputs feature is definitely a life-saver for building LLM-based apps, but it could come with some performance trade-offs. A new paper titled "Let Me Speak Freely? A Study on the Impact of Format Restrictions on Performance of Large Language Models" highlights this concern. 📖 Some insights: ⛳ The paper examines the effects of structured generation, where LLMs produce content in standardized formats like JSON or XML, which is common in real-world applications for extracting key information. ⛳ It shows that while structured generation simplifies parsing and integration into applications, it also has a significant downside. Specifically, LLMs exhibit a notable decline in reasoning abilities when restricted to these formats, with stricter format constraints leading to greater performance degradation. ⛳ Looser format restrictions generally improve performance and reduce variance in reasoning tasks. Parsing errors, while not the primary cause of performance differences, can be mitigated through corrective prompting. 👉 I’m not sure if this applies to the latest OpenAI models since the authors only tested it on GPT-3.5 and a few other models that might not be fully optimized for structured outputs. But it’s definitely something to keep in mind and check if you’re planning to use this feature a lot. Link: https://lnkd.in/eHRURmSH
Is it because the instructions to generate structured output getting mixed up with the prompt? I mean hit on performance and reasoning.
This is an insightful perspective! The study really highlights the balance between structure and performance in LLM-based apps. Your expertise in Gen AI technology would add valuable insights to this discussion, Aishwarya Naresh Reganti.
Good to know!
Principal Engineer at VOICEplug | Conversational AI | Building Voice Assistants
5moAishwarya Naresh Reganti I just learnt this week that the reverse is also true. Given a structred input and asking the LLM to generate a natural sounding response ( dialog ). The prompt that was performing good with gpt-3.5-turbo is giving terrible results on gpt-4o-mini.