Sequential generation

[freckletonj]

Per @brandonwillard 's suggestion, I'm adding a feature request to allow generated text to be tied to a variable for easy access; useful in the case where one prompt has multiple pieces being generated, and you want access to each.

guidance offers a feature that looks like this:

prompt = '''
Here's one sentence: {{gen "SENTENCE_1"}}
Now, another sentence: {{gen "SENTENCE_2"}}
'''
out = guidance(prompt)()

print(out['SENTENCE_1'])
# <prints what the LLM generated>

print(out['SENTENCE_2'])
# <prints the other sentence>

Already, outlines allows this from the generation side:

prompt = '''
Here's one sentence: [a-z]{0,50}
Now, another sentence: [a-z]{0,50}
'''

But the user would have to parse each sentence out themselves.

Python has a syntax that allows this for instance, perhaps we copy that?

pattern = r"(?P<day>\d{2})-(?P<month>\d{2})-(?P<year>\d{4})"
text = "The date is 25-12-2021"
match = re.search(pattern, text)

edit: upon experiment, that date pattern already works great with outlines and generates a valid(ish) date. Our regex parser already respects the naming syntax then, apparently!

[rlouf]

@freckletonj thank you for opening an issue! Would you mind moving your message to #305 so we can consolidate requirements there?

[freckletonj]

This is #305, do you mean add it to #182? I've left a comment over there: #182 (comment)

[rlouf]

Yes sorry 😅