CAFE通过实验设计分析多组件AI系统中各模块对回答质量的影响。
CAFE: A Compound-AI Factorial Evaluation Framework

- 将AI组件设为因子,构建因子设计实验
- 识别出影响答案质量的关键组件及交互作用
- 适合需要优化AI流水线的开发者和研究者
我们提出CAFE(Compound-AI Factorial Evaluation),一个开源平台,将实验设计引入复合AI系统(CAIS)的评估。此类系统包含多个可替换组件(如检索器、模型、提示模板),但从业者往往不清楚哪个组件对答案质量影响最大。CAFE允许用户将流水线中的可替换组件作为因子,构建因子设计,运行所有配置,并使用可配置的LLM评判器结合人工评分员对答案打分。基于评分结果,采用混合效应模型分析各组件及其交互对质量方差的贡献,报告效应大小、显著性、最优配置、成本与延迟权衡以及评判者-人类一致性。相比现有工具仅搜索最优配置或孤立评分,CAFE还能解释质量差异的来源并判断差异是否显著。我们在HotpotQA基准数据集上的检索增强问答任务中验证了CAFE,其能准确恢复预设的因子效应,并在置换零假设下保持校准。CAFE已以Python包和Web应用形式开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We introduce CAFE (Compound-AI Factorial Evaluation), an open-source platform that brings design of experiments to the evaluation of compound AI systems (CAIS). Such systems expose many interchangeable choices - e.g. which retriever, model, or prompt - and practitioners rarely know which of them most affects answer quality. With CAFE, a practitioner registers each swappable component of a pipeline as a factor to build a factorial design over the chosen factors, run the resulting configurations, and score the answers on a shared rubric using a configurable LLM judge together with human raters. From these ratings it attributes answer-quality variance to the components and their interactions with mixed-effects models and reports effect sizes, significance, the best configuration, cost and latency trade-offs, and judge-human reliability. Whereas existing tools mostly either search for a good configuration or score outputs in isolation, CAFE also explains which component drives quality and whether an observed difference is significant. We validate CAFE on a retrieval-augmented question-answering (QA) pipeline over the HotpotQA benchmark dataset, where it recovers planted factor effects and stays calibrated under a permutation null. CAFE is released as a Python package and as a Web application.
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