[msp26]

> I see plenty of use cases for such a big context, but re-paying, at every API call, to re-submit the exact same knowledge base seems very inefficient.

If you don't care about latency or can wait to set up a batch of inputs in one go there's an alternative method. I call it batch prompting and pretty much everything we do at work with gpt-4 uses this now. If people are interested I'll do a proper writeup on how to implement it but the general idea is very straightforward and works reliably. I also think this is a much better evaluation of context than needle in a haystack.

Example for classifying game genres from descriptions.

Default:

[Prompt][Functions][Examples][game description]

- >

{"genre": [genre], "sub-genre": [sub-genre]}

Batch Prompting:

[Prompt][Functions][Examples]<game1>[description]</game><game2>[description]</game><game3>[description]</game>...

- >

{"game1": {...}, "game2": {...}, "game3": {...}, ...}

[hobofan]

I attempted similar mechanics multiple times in the past, but always ditched them, as there was always a non-negligable amount of cross-contamination happening between the individual instances you are batching. That caused so much of a headache that it wasn't really worth it.

[msp26]

Yeah that's definitely a risk with language models but it doesn't seem to be too bad for my use cases. Can I ask what tasks you used it for?

I don't really intend for this method to be final. I'll switch everything over to finetunes at some point. But this works way better than I would have expected so I kept using it.

[hobofan]

One thing I tried using it for was for a summarization/reformulation tasks, where it did RAG of ~3-4 smallish (~single sentence) documents per instance where each should be in the end form a coherent sentence. There, batching either caused one of the facts to slip into an adjacent instance or two instances to be merged into one.

Another thing I used it for was data extraction, where I extracted units of measurements and other key attributes out of descriptions from classifieds listings (my SO and me were looking for a cheap used couch). Non-batched it performed very well, while in the batched mode, it either mixed dimensions of multiple listings or after the summary for the initial listing it just gave nulls for all following listings.

[vermorel]

Agreed, some problem here.