Working with Evaluators

The Patronus AI Experimentation Framework lets you to write your own evaluators that can run locally, and use remote Patronus-hosted Evaluators. This document will show you how to write your own evaluators and how to use them with Patronus Evaluators.

Function-Based evaluators

Let's define a simple evaluator that will compare the model output to the gold answer. (This evaluator is case insensitive and ignores leading and trailing whitespaces.)


from patronus import evaluator

@evaluator
def iexact_match(evaluated_model_output: str, evaluated_model_gold_answer: str) -> bool:
    return evaluated_model_output.lower().strip() == evaluated_model_gold_answer.lower().strip()

To define a function-based evaluator, you need to wrap your evaluator function with the @evaluator decorator.

When defining parameters for the function, you must name them correctly. The available options are:

evaluated_model_system_prompt
evaluated_model_retrieved_context
evaluated_model_input
evaluated_model_output
evaluated_model_gold_answer

These parameters will be injected by the framework. The values correspond directly to the fields provided in the dataset, or, in the case of evaluated_model_output, it may be returned by the task.

In its simplest form, an evaluator only needs to return a boolean value. However, an evaluator can also return an EvaluationResult object, which we'll discuss in the next section.

Full Code Example

Below is a complete example demonstrating how to use the iexact_match evaluator:

from patronus import Client, evaluator

client = Client()


@evaluator
def iexact_match(evaluated_model_output: str, evaluated_model_gold_answer: str) -> bool:
    return evaluated_model_output.lower().strip() == evaluated_model_gold_answer.lower().strip()


client.experiment(
    "Tutorial",
    data=[
        {
            "evaluated_model_input": "Translate 'Good night' to French.",
            "evaluated_model_output": "bonne nuit",
            "evaluated_model_gold_answer": "Bonne nuit",
        },
        {
            "evaluated_model_input": "Summarize: 'AI improves efficiency'.",
            "evaluated_model_output": "ai improves efficiency",
            "evaluated_model_gold_answer": "AI improves efficiency",
        },
    ],
    evaluators=[iexact_match],
    experiment_name="Case Insensitive Match",
)

Class-Based Evaluators

For a more complex example, we'll use the Levenshtein distance. Levenshtein distance measures the difference between two strings. In our case, we want to compare the model's output to the gold answer. The output doesn't need to be an exact match, but it should be close. Additionally, we want to be able to set a threshold to determine whether the evaluation passes or not.

Before we can start we need to install Levenshtein dependency.

pip install Levenshtein

Now we can write our class-based evaluator.

from Levenshtein import distance

from patronus import Client, Evaluator, EvaluationResult, simple_task


class LevenshteinScorer(Evaluator):
    def __init__(self, pass_threshold: float):
        self.pass_threshold = pass_threshold
        super().__init__()

    def evaluate(self, evaluated_model_output: str, evaluated_model_gold_answer: str) -> EvaluationResult:
        max_len = max(len(x) for x in [evaluated_model_output, evaluated_model_gold_answer])
        score = 1
        if max_len > 0:
            score = 1 - (distance(evaluated_model_output, evaluated_model_gold_answer) / max_len)

        return EvaluationResult(
            score_raw=score,
            pass_=score >= self.pass_threshold,
            tags={"pass_threshold": str(self.pass_threshold)},
        )

A class-based evaluator needs to inherit from the Evaluator base class and must implement the evaluate() method. Similar to the function-based evaluator, the evaluate() method only accepts predefined parameter names (e.g. evaluated_model_output, evaluated_model_gold_answer).

The return type of the evaluate() method can be a bool or an EvaluationResult object, as shown in this example. The EvaluationResult object provides a more detailed assessment by including:

score_raw: The calculated score reflecting the similarity between the evaluated output and the gold answer. While the score is often normalized between 0 and 1, with 1 representing an exact match, it doesn’t have to be normalized.
pass_: A boolean indicating whether the score meets the pass threshold.
tags: A dictionary that can store additional metadata as key-value pairs, such as the threshold used during the evaluation.

If the return type is a boolean, that is equivalent to returning an EvaluationResult object with only the pass_ value set.

Full Code Example

Below is a complete example demonstrating how to use the LevenshteinScorer evaluator to assess the similarity between model outputs and gold answers.

from Levenshtein import distance
from patronus import Client, Evaluator, EvaluationResult

client = Client()

class LevenshteinScorer(Evaluator):
    def __init__(self, pass_threshold: float):
        self.pass_threshold = pass_threshold
        super().__init__()

    def evaluate(self, evaluated_model_output: str, evaluated_model_gold_answer: str) -> EvaluationResult:
        max_len = max(len(x) for x in [evaluated_model_output, evaluated_model_gold_answer])
        score = 1
        if max_len > 0:
            score = 1 - (distance(evaluated_model_output, evaluated_model_gold_answer) / max_len)

        return EvaluationResult(
            score_raw=score,
            pass_=score >= self.pass_threshold,
            tags={"pass_threshold": str(self.pass_threshold)},
        )

client.experiment(
    "Tutorial",
    data=[
        {
            "evaluated_model_input": "Translate 'Goodbye' to Spanish.",
            "evaluated_model_output": "Hasta luego",
            "evaluated_model_gold_answer": "Adiós",
        },
        {
            "evaluated_model_input": "Summarize: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'.",
            "evaluated_model_output": "Quick brown fox jumps over dog",
            "evaluated_model_gold_answer": "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog",
        },
    ],
    evaluators=[LevenshteinScorer(pass_threshold=0.8)],
    experiment_name="Levenshtein Distance",
)

Async Evaluators

The Patronus Experimentation Framework supports both synchronous and asynchronous evaluators. Defining an asynchronous evaluator is as simple as using Python's async functions.

from patronus import evaluator, Evaluator

@evaluator
async def my_evaluator(...):
    ...

class MyEvaluator(Evaluator):
    ...
    async def evaluate(...):
        ...

Patronus Evaluators

Patronus Evaluators are remotely hosted evaluators developed and maintained by the Patronus AI team. The following section describes how to use these evaluators in your evaluation workflow, and combine them with local evaluators.

Referencing Evaluators (PII Evaluator Example)

Using Patronus Evaluators is straightforward. For Evaluators that do not require Profiles, you can reference them by simply providing an ID or an alias:

from patronus import Client

client = Client()

# Reference remote evaluator by alias
detect_pii = client.remote_evaluator("pii")

cli.experiment(
    "Tutorial",
    data=...,
    task=...,
    evaluators=[detect_pii],
)

Full Code Example

Below is an example of how to use the pii evaluator to detect personally identifiable information (PII) in model outputs. The evaluator is referenced by its alias:

from patronus import Client

client = Client()

detect_pii = client.remote_evaluator("pii")

client.experiment(
    "Tutorial",
    data=[
        {
            "evaluated_model_input": "Please provide your contact details.",
            "evaluated_model_output": "My email is [email protected] and my phone number is 123-456-7890.",
        },
        {
            "evaluated_model_input": "Share your personal information.",
            "evaluated_model_output": "My name is Jane Doe and I live at 123 Elm Street.",
        },
    ],
    evaluators=[detect_pii],
    experiment_name="Detect PII",
)

Referencing Evaluators (Custom Evaluator Example)

For evaluators that require Profiles, such as the Custom Evaluator, you must provide the profile_name along with the evaluator's ID or alias.

is_polite_evaluator = client.remote_evaluator(
    "custom-large",
    "system:is-polite"
)

In this example, the evaluator "custom-large" is referenced with a specific system profile managed by the Patronus AI team, which is available in your account out of the box.

Creating Evaluator Profiles Dynamically (Custom Evaluator)

If you need to create a profile from code, which is often required for a Custom Evaluator, you can specify its profile configuration directly in your code:

evaluate_proper_language = cli.remote_evaluator(
    "custom-large",
    "detect-requested-programming-languages",
    profile_config={
        "pass_criteria": textwrap.dedent(
            """
            The MODEL OUTPUT should provide only valid code in any well-known programming language.
            """
        ),
    }
)

If you attempt to tweak the profile configuration for an existing profile, it will throw an error. This safeguard is in place because modifying a profile can be risky. Changes may impact other users in your account who rely on the same profile or could disrupt a production workload that is relying on that profile.

To update an evaluator profile, you must explicitly pass the allow_update=True argument:.

import textwrap
from patronus import Client

cli = Client()

evaluate_proper_language = cli.remote_evaluator(
    "custom-large",
    "detect-requested-programming-languages",
    profile_config={
        "pass_criteria": textwrap.dedent(
            """
            The MODEL OUTPUT should provide only valid code in any well-known programming language.
            The MODEL OUTPUT should consist of the code in a programming language specified in the USER INPUT.
            """
        ),
    },
    allow_update=True,
)

Full Code Example

Here’s a complete example that demonstrates how to create a dynamic evaluator profile, define evaluation criteria, and run an experiment:

import logging
import textwrap

from patronus import Client, task


client = Client()

evaluate_proper_language = client.remote_evaluator(
    "custom-large",
    "detect-requested-programming-languages",
    profile_config={
        "pass_criteria": textwrap.dedent(
            """
            The MODEL OUTPUT should provide only valid code in any well-known programming language.
            The MODEL OUTPUT should consist of the code in a programming language specified in the USER INPUT.
            """
        ),
    },
    allow_update=True,
)

data = [
    {
        "evaluated_model_input": "Write a hello world example in Python.",
        "evaluated_model_output": "print('Hello World!')",
    },
    {
        "evaluated_model_input": "Write a hello world example in JavaScript.",
        "evaluated_model_output": "print('Hello World!')",
    },
]

client.experiment(
    "Tutorial",
    data=data,
    evaluators=[evaluate_proper_language],
    experiment_name="Detect Programming Languages",
)