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Prompt Alignment

The prompt alignment metric uses LLM-as-a-judge to measure whether your LLM application is able to generate actual_outputs that aligns with any instructions specified in your prompt template. deepeval's prompt alignment metric is a self-explaining LLM-Eval, meaning it outputs a reason for its metric score.

tip

Not sure if this metric is for you? Run the follow command to find out:

deepeval recommend metrics

Required Arguments

To use the PromptAlignmentMetric, you'll have to provide the following arguments when creating an LLMTestCase:

  • input
  • actual_output

The input and actual_output are required to create an LLMTestCase (and hence required by all metrics) even though they might not be used for metric calculation. Read the How Is It Calculated section below to learn more.

Example

from deepeval import evaluate
from deepeval.test_case import LLMTestCase
from deepeval.metrics import PromptAlignmentMetric

metric = PromptAlignmentMetric(
prompt_instructions=["Reply in all uppercase"],
model="gpt-4",
include_reason=True
)
test_case = LLMTestCase(
input="What if these shoes don't fit?",
# Replace this with the actual output from your LLM application
actual_output="We offer a 30-day full refund at no extra cost."
)

# To run metric as a standalone
# metric.measure(test_case)
# print(metric.score, metric.reason)

evaluate(test_cases=[test_case], metrics=[metric])

There are ONE mandatory and SIX optional parameters when creating an PromptAlignmentMetric:

  • prompt_instructions: a list of strings specifying the instructions you want followed in your prompt template.
  • [Optional] threshold: a float representing the minimum passing threshold, defaulted to 0.5.
  • [Optional] model: a string specifying which of OpenAI's GPT models to use, OR any custom LLM model of type DeepEvalBaseLLM. Defaulted to 'gpt-4o'.
  • [Optional] include_reason: a boolean which when set to True, will include a reason for its evaluation score. Defaulted to True.
  • [Optional] strict_mode: a boolean which when set to True, enforces a binary metric score: 1 for perfection, 0 otherwise. It also overrides the current threshold and sets it to 1. Defaulted to False.
  • [Optional] async_mode: a boolean which when set to True, enables concurrent execution within the measure() method. Defaulted to True.
  • [Optional] verbose_mode: a boolean which when set to True, prints the intermediate steps used to calculate said metric to the console, as outlined in the How Is It Calculated section. Defaulted to False.

As a standalone

You can also run the PromptAlignmentMetric on a single test case as a standalone, one-off execution.

...

metric.measure(test_case)
print(metric.score, metric.reason)
caution

This is great for debugging or if you wish to build your own evaluation pipeline, but you will NOT get the benefits (testing reports, Confident AI platform) and all the optimizations (speed, caching, computation) the evaluate() function or deepeval test run offers.

How Is It Calculated?

The PromptAlignmentMetric score is calculated according to the following equation:

Prompt Alignment=Number of Instructions FollowedTotal Number of Instructions\text{Prompt Alignment} = \frac{\text{Number of Instructions Followed}}{\text{Total Number of Instructions}}

The PromptAlignmentMetric uses an LLM to classify whether each prompt instruction is followed in the actual_output using additional context from the input.

tip

By providing an initial list of prompt_instructions instead of the entire prompt template, the PromptAlignmentMetric is able to more accurately determine whether the core instructions laid out in your prompt template is followed.