Building LLM Applications using LangChain
Chapter 1: Introduction to the LangChain Framework
The Motivation for a Framework
LangChain's Core Architecture
Setting Up Your Development Environment
Your First LangChain Application
Chapter 2: Models, Prompts, and Parsers
Interfacing with LLMs and Chat Models
Managing Prompts with PromptTemplates
Implementing Few-Shot Prompting
Structuring Output with Parsers
Hands-on Practical: Building a Structured Data Extractor
Chapter 3: Constructing Chains for Sequential Operations
Fundamentals of Chains
Using the Simple LLMChain
Creating Sequential Chains
Implementing Conditional Logic with Router Chains
Hands-on Practical: A Content Generation Pipeline
Chapter 4: Memory for Conversational Applications
The Importance of State in Conversations
Buffer Memory for Short-Term Recall
Summarization Memory for Long Conversations
Using Windowed and Token-Based Memory
Adding Memory to Chains and Agents
Practice: Building a Chatbot with Memory
Chapter 5: Data Connection for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Architecture of a RAG System
Loading Data with Document Loaders
Splitting Documents for Processing
Vector Stores and Embeddings
Fetching Data with Retrievers
Building a Question-Answering Chain
Hands-on Practical: Q&A over Your Documents
Chapter 6: Developing Autonomous Agents
Introduction to Agents and Tools
The Agent, Tool, and Toolkit Architecture
Using Built-in Tools
Creating Custom Tools
Exploring Agent Types and Executors
Hands-on Practical: A Web-Searching Agent
Adding Memory to Chains and Agents
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- Memory, LangChain Contributors, 2023 (LangChain Inc.) - Official LangChain documentation explaining various memory types, their configuration, and how they manage conversational history within LLM applications.
- Agents, LangChain Contributors, 2024 (LangChain) - Official LangChain documentation detailing agents, their design principles, supported types, and how they integrate components like tools and memory for complex, multi-turn interactions.
- ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models, Shunyu Yao, Jeffrey Zhao, Dian Yu, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran, Karthik Narasimhan, Yuan Cao, 2022 arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03629 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2210.03629 - Foundational paper introducing the ReAct paradigm, which combines reasoning and acting steps for language models. This method is crucial for understanding how sophisticated agents, like those in LangChain, use LLMs to make decisions and utilize tools with memory.