Parrot: Efficient Serving of LLM-based Applications with Semantic Variable

TL;DR

Parrot introduces Semantic Variables to expose application-level knowledge to LLM services, enabling end-to-end optimization and significantly improving the performance of LLM-based applications.

Contribution

It proposes Semantic Variables as a novel abstraction to enhance public LLM services with application-level context, improving overall application performance.

Findings

Achieves up to tenfold performance improvements in LLM applications.

Enables data flow analysis across multiple LLM requests.

Demonstrates significant benefits in practical use cases.

Abstract

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled LLM-based applications (a.k.a. AI agents or co-pilots), a new software paradigm that combines the strength of LLM and conventional software. Diverse LLM applications from different tenants could design complex workflows using multiple LLM requests to accomplish one task. However, they have to use the over-simplified request-level API provided by today's public LLM services, losing essential application-level information. Public LLM services have to blindly optimize individual LLM requests, leading to sub-optimal end-to-end performance of LLM applications. This paper introduces Parrot, an LLM service system that focuses on the end-to-end experience of LLM-based applications. Parrot proposes Semantic Variable, a unified abstraction to expose application-level knowledge to public LLM services. A Semantic Variable annotates an input/output variable in the prompt of a request, and creates the data pipeline when connecting multiple LLM requests, providing a natural way to program LLM applications. Exposing Semantic Variables to the public LLM service allows it to perform conventional data flow analysis to uncover the correlation across multiple LLM requests. This correlation opens a brand-new optimization space for the end-to-end performance of LLM-based applications. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Parrot can achieve up to an order-of-magnitude improvement for popular and practical use cases of LLM applications.