STORM: Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking

| Research preview | Paper | Documentation (WIP) |

Latest News 🔥

• [2024/04] We release refactored version of STORM codebase! We define interface for STORM pipeline and reimplement STORM-wiki (check out src/storm_wiki) to demonstrate how to instantiate the pipeline. We provide API to support customization of different language models and retrieval/search integration.

Overview (Try STORM now!)

STORM is a LLM system that writes Wikipedia-like articles from scratch based on Internet search.

While the system cannot produce publication-ready articles that often require a significant number of edits, experienced Wikipedia editors have found it helpful in their pre-writing stage.

Try out our live research preview to see how STORM can help your knowledge exploration journey and please provide feedback to help us improve the system 🙏!

How STORM works

STORM breaks down generating long articles with citations into two steps:

1. Pre-writing stage: The system conducts Internet-based research to collect references and generates an outline.
2. Writing stage: The system uses the outline and references to generate the full-length article with citations.

STORM identifies the core of automating the research process as automatically coming up with good questions to ask. Directly prompting the language model to ask questions does not work well. To improve the depth and breadth of the questions, STORM adopts two strategies:

1. Perspective-Guided Question Asking: Given the input topic, STORM discovers different perspectives by surveying existing articles from similar topics and uses them to control the question-asking process.
2. Simulated Conversation: STORM simulates a conversation between a Wikipedia writer and a topic expert grounded in Internet sources to enable the language model to update its understanding of the topic and ask follow-up questions.

Based on the separation of the two stages, STORM is implemented in a highly modular way using dspy.

Getting started

1. Setup

Below, we provide a quick start guide to run STORM locally.

1. Install the required packages.

   conda create -n storm python=3.11
   conda activate storm
   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Set up OpenAI API key (if you want to use OpenAI models to power STORM) and You.com search API key. Create a file secrets.toml under the root directory and add the following content:

   # Set up OpenAI API key.
   OPENAI_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key"
   # If you are using the API service provided by OpenAI, include the following line:
   OPENAI_API_TYPE="openai"
   # If you are using the API service provided by Microsoft Azure, include the following lines:
   OPENAI_API_TYPE="azure"
   AZURE_API_BASE="your_azure_api_base_url"
   AZURE_API_VERSION="your_azure_api_version"
   # Set up You.com search API key.
   YDC_API_KEY="your_youcom_api_key"

2. Running STORM-wiki locally

Currently, we provide example scripts under examples to demonstrate how you can run STORM using different models.

To run STORM with gpt family models: Make sure you have set up the OpenAI API key and run the following command.

python scripts/run_storm_wiki_gpt.py \
    --output_dir $OUTPUT_DIR \
    --do-research \
    --do-generate-outline \
    --do-generate-article \
    --do-polish-article

• --do-research: if True, simulate conversation to research the topic; otherwise, load the results.
• --do-generate-outline: If True, generate an outline for the topic; otherwise, load the results.
• --do-generate-article: If True, generate an article for the topic; otherwise, load the results.
• --do-polish-article: If True, polish the article by adding a summarization section and (optionally) removing duplicate content.

To run STORM with mistral family models on local VLLM server: have a VLLM server running with the Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 model and run the following command.

python scripts/run_storm_wiki_mistral.py \
    --url $URL \
    --port $PORT \
    --output_dir $OUTPUT_DIR \
    --do-research \
    --do-generate-outline \
    --do-generate-article \
    --do-polish-article

• --url URL of the VLLM server.
• --port Port of the VLLM server.

Customize STORM

Customization of the Pipeline

STORM is a knowledge curation engine consisting of 4 modules:

1. Knowledge Curation Module: Collects a broad coverage of information about the given topic.
2. Outline Generation Module: Organizes the collected information by generating a hierarchical outline for the curated knowledge.
3. Article Generation Module: Populates the generated outline with the collected information.
4. Article Polishing Module: Refines and enhances the written article for better presentation.

The interface for each module is defined in src/interface.py, while their implementations are instantiated in src/storm_wiki/modules/*. These modules can be customized according to your specific requirements (e.g., generating sections in bullet point format instead of full paragraphs).

🌟 You can share your customization of Engine by making PRs to this repo!

Customization of Retriever Module

As a knowledge curation engine, STORM grabs information from the Retriever module. The interface for the Retriever module is defined in src/interface.py. Please consult the interface documentation if you plan to create a new instance or replace the default search engine API. By default, STORM utilizes the You.com search engine API (see YouRM in src/rm.py).

🌟 PRs for integrating more search engines/retrievers are highly appreciated!

Customization of Language Models

STORM provides the following language model implementations in src/lm.py:

• OpenAIModel
• ClaudeModel
• VLLMClient
• TGIClient
• TogetherClient

🌟 PRs for integrating more language model clients are highly appreciated!

💡 For a good practice,

• choose a cheaper/faster model for conv_simulator_lm which is used to split queries, synthesize answers in the conversation.
• if you need to conduct the actual writing step, choose a more powerful model for article_gen_lm. Based on our experiments, weak models are bad at generating text with citations.
• for open models, adding one-shot example can help it better follow instructions.

Please refer to the scripts in the examples directory for concrete guidance on customizing the language model used in the pipeline.

Replicate NAACL2024 result

Please switch to the branch NAACL-2024-code-backup

Show me instructions

Paper Experiments

The FreshWiki dataset used in our experiments can be found in ./FreshWiki.

Run the following commands under ./src.

Pre-writing Stage

For batch experiment on FreshWiki dataset:

python -m scripts.run_prewriting --input-source file --input-path ../FreshWiki/topic_list.csv  --engine gpt-4 --do-research --max-conv-turn 5 --max-perspective 5

• --engine (choices=[gpt-4, gpt-35-turbo]): the LLM engine used for generating the outline
• --do-research: if True, simulate conversation to research the topic; otherwise, load the results.
• --max-conv-turn: the maximum number of questions for each information-seeking conversation
• --max-perspective: the maximum number of perspectives to be considered, each perspective corresponds to an information-seeking conversation.
  • STORM also uses a general conversation to collect basic information about the topic. So, the maximum number of QA pairs is max_turn * (max_perspective + 1). 💡 Reducing max_turn or max_perspective can speed up the process and reduce the cost but may result in less comprehensive outline.
  • The parameter will not have any effect if --disable-perspective is set (the perspective-driven question asking is disabled).

To run the experiment on a single topic:

python -m scripts.run_prewriting --input-source console --engine gpt-4 --max-conv-turn 5 --max-perspective 5 --do-research

• The script will ask you to enter the Topic and the Ground truth url that will be excluded. If you do not have any url to exclude, leave that field empty.

The generated outline will be saved in {output_dir}/{topic}/storm_gen_outline.txt and the collected references will be saved in {output_dir}/{topic}/raw_search_results.json.

Writing Stage

For batch experiment on FreshWiki dataset:

python -m scripts.run_writing --input-source file --input-path ../FreshWiki/topic_list.csv --engine gpt-4 --do-polish-article --remove-duplicate

• --do-polish-article: if True, polish the article by adding a summarization section and removing duplicate content if --remove-duplicate is set True.

To run the experiment on a single topic:

python -m scripts.run_writing --input-source console --engine gpt-4 --do-polish-article --remove-duplicate

• The script will ask you to enter the Topic. Please enter the same topic as the one used in the pre-writing stage.

The generated article will be saved in {output_dir}/{topic}/storm_gen_article.txt and the references corresponding to citation index will be saved in {output_dir}/{topic}/url_to_info.json. If --do-polish-article is set, the polished article will be saved in {output_dir}/{topic}/storm_gen_article_polished.txt.

Customize the STORM Configurations

We set up the default LLM configuration in LLMConfigs in src/modules/utils.py. You can use set_conv_simulator_lm(),set_question_asker_lm(), set_outline_gen_lm(), set_article_gen_lm(), set_article_polish_lm() to override the default configuration. These functions take in an instance from dspy.dsp.LM or dspy.dsp.HFModel.

Automatic Evaluation

In our paper, we break down the evaluation into two parts: outline quality and full-length article quality.

Outline Quality

We introduce heading soft recall and heading entity recall to evaluate the outline quality. This makes it easier to prototype methods for pre-writing.

Run the following command under ./eval to compute the metrics on FreshWiki dataset:

python eval_outline_quality.py --input-path ../FreshWiki/topic_list.csv --gt-dir ../FreshWiki --pred-dir ../results --pred-file-name storm_gen_outline.txt --result-output-path ../results/storm_outline_quality.csv

Full-length Article Quality

eval/eval_article_quality.py provides the entry point of evaluating full-length article quality using ROUGE, entity recall, and rubric grading. Run the following command under eval to compute the metrics:

python eval_article_quality.py --input-path ../FreshWiki/topic_list.csv --gt-dir ../FreshWiki --pred-dir ../results --gt-dir ../FreshWiki --output-dir ../results/storm_article_eval_results --pred-file-name storm_gen_article_polished.txt

Use the Metric Yourself

The similarity-based metrics (i.e., ROUGE, entity recall, and heading entity recall) are implemented in eval/metrics.py.

For rubric grading, we use the prometheus-13b-v1.0 introduced in this paper. eval/evaluation_prometheus.py provides the entry point of using the metric.

Contributions

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to open an issue or pull request. We welcome contributions to improve the system and the codebase!

Contact person: Yijia Shao and Yucheng Jiang

Citation

Please cite our paper if you use this code or part of it in your work:

@inproceedings{shao2024assisting,
      title={{Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models}}, 
      author={Yijia Shao and Yucheng Jiang and Theodore A. Kanell and Peter Xu and Omar Khattab and Monica S. Lam},
      year={2024},
      booktitle={Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)}
}