Guardrails¶

Guardrails play a crucial role in ensuring that only high quality output is produced by LLM apps. By setting guardrail thresholds based on feedback functions, we can directly leverage the same trusted evaluation metrics used for observability, at inference time.

Typical guardrail usage¶

Typical guardrails only allow decisions based on the output, and have no impact on the intermediate steps of an LLM application.

Standard Guardrails Flow

TruLens guardrails for internal steps¶

While it is commonly discussed to use guardrails for blocking unsafe or inappropriate output from reaching the end user, TruLens guardrails can also be leveraged to improve the internal processing of LLM apps.

If we consider a RAG, context filter guardrails can be used to evaluate the context relevance of each context chunk, and only pass relevant chunks to the LLM for generation. Doing so reduces the chance of hallucination and reduces token usage.

Context Filtering with Guardrails

Using TruLens guardrails¶

TruLens context filter guardrails are easy to add to your app built with custom python, Langchain, or Llama-Index.

Using context filter guardrails

pythonwith Langchainwith Llama-Index

from trulens.core.guardrails.base import context_filter

feedback = Feedback(provider.context_relevance)

class RAG_from_scratch:
@context_filter(feedback, 0.5, keyword_for_prompt="query")
def retrieve(query: str) -> list:
    results = vector_store.query(
    query_texts=query,
    n_results=3
)
return [doc for sublist in results['documents'] for doc in sublist]
...

from trulens.apps.langchain.guardrails import WithFeedbackFilterDocuments

feedback = Feedback(provider.context_relevance)

filtered_retriever = WithFeedbackFilterDocuments.of_retriever(
    retriever=retriever,
    feedback=feedback
    threshold=0.5
)

rag_chain = (
    {"context": filtered_retriever
    | format_docs, "question": RunnablePassthrough()}
    | prompt
    | llm
    | StrOutputParser()
)

from trulens.apps.llamaindex.guardrails import WithFeedbackFilterNodes

feedback = Feedback(provider.context_relevance)

filtered_query_engine = WithFeedbackFilterNodes(query_engine,
    feedback=feedback,
    threshold=0.5)

Warning

Feedback function used as a guardrail must only return a float score, and cannot also return reasons.

TruLens has native python and framework-specific tooling for implementing guardrails. Read more about the available guardrails in native python, Langchain and Llama-Index.