ollama-grid-search

Ollama Grid Search: Instantly Evaluate Multiple LLMs and Prompts.

This project automates the process of selecting the best models, prompts, or inference parameters for a given use-case, allowing you to iterate over their combinations and to visually inspect the results.

It assumes Ollama is installed and serving endpoints, either in localhost or in a remote server.

Here’s what an experiment for a simple prompt, tested on 3 different models, looks like:

Dowloads: · macOS · Windows · Linux · All Releases

(For a more in-depth look at an evaluation process assisted by this tool, please check https://dezoito.github.io/2023/12/27/rust-ollama-grid-search.html).

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Features
• Grid Search Concept
• A/B Testing
• Prompt Archive
• Experiment Logs
• Future Features
• Contributing
• Development
• Citations
• Acknowledgements

Installation

Check the releases page for the project, or on the sidebar.

macOS Installation (Apple Silicon)

For Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) Macs, the application uses ad-hoc code signing (a free alternative to paid Apple Developer certificates). When first launching the app:

1. Download the .dmg file for your architecture (aarch64 for Apple Silicon)
2. Open the DMG and drag the app to Applications
3. Right-click (or Control+click) the application and select “Open”
4. Click “Open” in the security dialog that appears
5. The app will now launch normally (subsequent launches can use double-click)

This is necessary because the app is not notarized with a paid Apple Developer account. The app is safe to use - this is standard for open-source macOS applications distributed outside the App Store.

Using with llmman

llmman is a local model runner that serves the Ollama API and works as a drop-in replacement for Ollama:

To use it, open Settings and set the Ollama Server URL to http://localhost:17434. Models pulled with llmman will be listed and can be selected for experiments as usual.

Features

• Automatically fetches models from local or remote Ollama servers;
• Iterates over multiple different models, prompts and parameters to generate inferences;
• A/B test different prompts on several models simultaneously;
• Allows multiple iterations for each combination of parameters;
• Allows limited concurrency or synchronous inference calls (to prevent spamming servers);
• Optionally outputs inference parameters and response metadata (inference time, tokens and tokens/s);
• Refetching of individual inference calls;
• Model selection can be filtered by name;
• List experiments which can be downloaded in JSON format;
• Experiments can be inspected in readable views;
• Re-run past experiments, cloning or modifying the parameters used in the past;
• Configurable inference timeout;
• Custom default parameters and system prompts can be defined in settings
• Fully functional prompt database with examples;
• Prompts can be selected and “autocompleted” by typing “/” in the inputs

Grid Search (or something similar…)

Technically, the term “grid search” refers to iterating over a series of different model hyperparams to optimize model performance, but that usually means parameters like batch_size, learning_rate, or number_of_epochs, more commonly used in training.

But the concept here is similar:

Lets define a selection of models, a prompt and some parameter combinations:

The prompt will be submitted once for each parameter value, for each one of the selected models, generating a set of responses.

A/B Testing

Similarly, you can perform A/B tests by selecting different models and compare results for the same prompt/parameter combination, or test different prompts under similar configurations:

Comparing the results of different prompts for the same model

Prompt Archive

You can save and manage your prompts (we want to make prompts compatible with Open WebUI)

You can autocomplete prompts by typing “/” (inspired by Open WebUI, as well):

Experiment Logs

You can list, inspect, or download your experiments:

Future Features

• Grading results and filtering by grade
• Importing, exporting and sharing prompt lists and experiment files.

Contributing

• For obvious bugs and spelling mistakes, please go ahead and submit a PR.

• If you want to propose a new feature, change existing functionality, or propose anything more complex, please open an issue for discussion, before getting work done on a PR.

Development

The development notes provide setup instructions, sequence diagrams, and workflow charts that should make it easier to understand the project and get started.

Related projects

Also building with local LLMs? You might find my other project useful: markitdown-api - a lightweight, Dockerized FastAPI server that wraps Microsoft’s MarkItDown to convert files (PDF, Word, Excel, and more) into clean Markdown for RAG and LLM pipelines (perfect for air-gapped systems).

Citations

The following works and theses have cited this repository:

Inouye, D & Lindo, L, & Lee, R & Allen, E; Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses: Applied Auto-tuning on LoRA Hyperparameters Santa Clara University, 2024 https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1271&context=cseng_senior

Thank you!

Huge thanks to @FabianLars, @peperroni21 and @TomReidNZ.