Overview

Opik Agent Optimizer Core Concepts

Common terminology and how we optimize

Overview

Understanding the core concepts of the Opik Agent Optimizer is essential for unlocking its full potential in LLM evaluation and optimization. This section explains the foundational terms, processes, and strategies that underpin effective agent and prompt optimization within Opik.

What is Agent Optimization (and Prompt Optimization)?

In Opik, Agent Optimization refers to the systematic process of refining and evaluating the prompts, configurations, and overall design of language model-based applications to maximize their performance. This is an iterative approach leveraging continuous testing, data-driven refinement, and advanced evaluation techniques.

Prompt Optimization is a crucial subset of Agent Optimization. It focuses specifically on improving the instructions (prompts) given to Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve desired outputs more accurately, consistently, and efficiently. Since prompts are the primary way to interact with and guide LLMs, optimizing them is fundamental to enhancing any LLM-powered agent or application.

Opik Agent Optimizer provides tools for both: directly optimizing individual prompt strings and also for optimizing more complex agentic structures that might involve multiple prompts, few-shot examples, or tool interactions.

Key Terms

A specialized algorithm within the Opik Agent Optimizer SDK designed to enhance prompt effectiveness. Each optimizer (e.g., MetaPromptOptimizer, FewShotBayesianOptimizer, EvolutionaryOptimizer, HierarchicalReflectiveOptimizer) employs unique strategies and configurable parameters to address specific optimization goals.

The object to optimize which contains your chat messages with placeholders for variables that change on each example. See the API Reference.

An object defining how to measure the performance of a prompt. The metric functions should accept two parameters:

  • dataset_item: A dictionary with the dataset item keys
  • llm_output: This will be populated with the LLM response

It should return either a ScoreResult object or a float.

A collection of data items, typically with inputs and expected outputs (ground truth), used to guide and evaluate the prompt optimization process. See Datasets for more information.

A single execution of a prompt optimization process using a specific configuration. For example, calling optimizer.optimize_prompt(...) once constitutes a Run. Each Run is typically logged to the Opik platform for tracking.

Each optimization run is made up of one or more optimization trials. A trial corresponds to a single evaluation of a candidate prompt or prompt configuration. You can few each

The model that is used to evaluate the prompt. This is the model that you use the prompt with, should be the same as the model you use in your application.

The model that is used to optimize the prompt. This is the model that the optimizer uses to improve your prompt, you will get the best performance by using the most powerful model for the optimization.

Next Steps

  • Explore specific Optimizers for algorithm details.
  • Refer to the FAQ for common questions and troubleshooting.
  • Refer to the API Reference for detailed configuration options.

📓 Want to see these concepts in action? Check out our Example Projects & Cookbooks for step-by-step, runnable Colab notebooks.