Databricks-Generative-AI-Engineer-Associate Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate Question and Answers

Addressing offensive or inflammatory outputs in a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system is critical for improving user experience and ensuring ethical AI deployment. Here's whyDis the most effective approach:

Manual data curation: The root cause of offensive outputs often comes from the underlying data used to train the model or populate the retrieval system. By manually curating the upstream data and conducting thorough reviews before the data is fed into the RAG system, the engineer can filter out harmful, offensive, or inappropriate content.

Improving data quality: Curating data ensures the system retrieves and generates responses from a high-quality, well-vetted dataset. This directly impacts the relevance and appropriateness of the outputs from the RAG system, preventing inflammatory content from being included in responses.

Effectiveness: This strategy directly tackles the problem at its source (the data) rather than just mitigating the consequences (such as informing users or restricting access). It ensures that the system consistently provides non-offensive, relevant information.

Other options, such as increasing the frequency of data updates or informing users about behavior expectations, may not directly mitigate the generation of inflammatory outputs.

Problem Context: The Generative AI Engineer needs a tool to build amulti-step LLM-based workflow. This type of workflow often involves chaining multiple steps together, such as query generation, retrieval of information, response generation, and post-processing, with LLMs integrated at several points.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: Pandas: Pandas is a powerful data manipulation library for structured data analysis, but it is not designed for managing or orchestrating multi-step workflows, especially those involving LLMs.

Option B: TensorFlow: TensorFlow is primarily used for training and deploying machine learning models, especially deep learning models. It is not designed for orchestrating multi-step tasks in LLM-based workflows.

Option C: PySpark: PySpark is a distributed computing framework used for large-scale data processing. While useful for handling big data, it is not specialized for chaining LLM-based operations.

Option D: LangChain: LangChain is a purpose-built framework designed specifically fororchestrating multi-step workflowswith large language models (LLMs). It enables developers to easily chain different tasks, such as retrieving documents, summarizing information, and generating responses, all in a structured flow. This makes it the best tool for building complex LLM-based workflows.

Thus,LangChainis the most suitable library for creating multi-step LLM-based workflows.

In a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application built to answer questions about internal documents, especially when the dataset contains irrelevant content, it's crucial to guide the system to focus on the right information. The best way to achieve this is byincluding a clear instruction in the system prompt(option C).

System Prompt as Guidance:The system prompt is an effective way to instruct the LLM to limit its focus to SnoPen AI-related content. By clearly specifying that the model should avoid answering questions unrelated to SnoPen AI, you add an additional layer of control that helps the model stay on-topic, even if irrelevant content is present in the dataset.

Why This Approach Works:The prompt acts as a guiding principle for the model, narrowing its focus to specific domains. This prevents the model from generating answers based on irrelevant content, such as advertisements or news unrelated to SnoPen AI.

Why Other Options Are Less Suitable:

A (Keep All Articles): Retaining all content, including irrelevant materials, without any filtering makes the system prone to generating answers based on unwanted data.

B (Include in the System Prompt about SnoPen AI): This option doesn’t address irrelevant content directly, and without filtering, the model might still retrieve and use irrelevant data.

D (Consolidating Documents into a Single Chunk): Grouping documents into a single chunk makes the retrieval process less efficient and won’t help filter out irrelevant content effectively.

Therefore, instructing the system in the prompt not to answer questions unrelated to SnoPen AI (option C) is the best approach to ensure the system filters out irrelevant information.

Problem Context: The engineer is developing an LLM-powered live sports commentary platform that needs to provide real-time updates and analyses based on the latest game scores. The critical requirement here is the capability to access and integrate real-time data efficiently with the platform for immediate analysis and reporting.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: DatabricksIQ: While DatabricksIQ offers integration and data processing capabilities, it is more aligned with data analytics rather than real-time feature serving, which is crucial for immediate updates necessary in a live sports commentary context.

Option B: Foundation Model APIs: These APIs facilitate interactions with pre-trained models and could be part of the solution, but on their own, they do not provide mechanisms to access real-time game scores.

Option C: Feature Serving: This is the correct answer as feature serving specifically refers to the real-time provision of data (features) to models for prediction. This would be essential for an LLM that generates analyses based on live game data, ensuring that the commentary is current and based on the latest events in the sport.

Option D: AutoML: This tool automates the process of applying machine learning models to real-world problems, but it does not directly provide real-time data access, which is a critical requirement for the platform.

Thus,Option C(Feature Serving) is the most suitable tool for the platform as it directly supports the real-time data needs of an LLM-powered sports commentary system, ensuring that the analyses and updates are based on the latest available information.

Building a basic LLM-enabled chat application with conversational capabilities, knowledge retrieval, and contextual memory requires specific components that work together to process queries, maintain context, and retrieve relevant information. Databricks’ Generative AI Engineer documentation outlines key components for such systems, particularly in the context of frameworks like LangChain or Databricks’ MosaicML integrations. Let’s evaluate the required components:

Understanding the Requirements:

Conversational capabilities: The app must generate natural, coherent responses.

Knowledge retrieval: It must access external or domain-specific knowledge.

Contextual memory: It must remember prior interactions in the conversation.

Databricks Reference:"A typical LLM chat application includes a memory component to track conversation history and a retrieval mechanism to incorporate external knowledge"("Databricks Generative AI Cookbook," 2023).

Evaluating the Options:

A. (Q): This appears incomplete or unclear (possibly a typo). Without further context, it’s not a valid component.

B. Vector Stores: These store embeddings of documents or knowledge bases, enabling semantic search and retrieval of relevant information for the LLM. This is critical for knowledge retrieval in a chat application.

Databricks Reference:"Vector stores, such as those integrated with Databricks’ Lakehouse, enable efficient retrieval of contextual data for LLMs"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks").

C. Conversation Buffer Memory: This component stores the conversation history, allowing the LLM to maintain context across multiple turns. It’s essential for contextual memory.

Databricks Reference:"Conversation Buffer Memory tracks prior user inputs and LLM outputs, ensuring context-aware responses"("Generative AI Engineer Guide").

D. External tools: These (e.g., APIs or calculators) enhance functionality but aren’t required for abasicchat app with the specified capabilities.

E. Chat loaders: These might refer to data loaders for chat logs, but they’re not a core chain component for conversational functionality or memory.

F. React Components: These relate to front-end UI development, not the LLM chain’s backend functionality.

Selecting the Two Required Components:

Forknowledge retrieval, Vector Stores (B) are necessary to fetch relevant external data, a cornerstone of Databricks’ RAG-based chat systems.

Forcontextual memory, Conversation Buffer Memory (C) is required to maintain conversation history, ensuring coherent and context-aware responses.

While an LLM itself is implied as the core generator, the question asks for chain components beyond the model, making B and C the minimal yet sufficient pair for a basic application.

Conclusion: The two required chain components areB. Vector StoresandC. Conversation Buffer Memory, as they directly address knowledge retrieval and contextual memory, respectively, aligning with Databricks’ documented best practices for LLM-enabled chat applications.

The task involves building a question-answering chatbot for an automotive company using a database of vehicle-related documents. The chatbot must efficiently process customer inquiries and provide accurate responses. Let’s evaluate each component to determine which isnotuseful, per Databricks Generative AI Engineer principles.

Option A: Response-generating LLM

An LLM is essential for generating natural language responses to customer queries based on retrieved information. This is a core component of any chatbot.

Databricks Reference:"The response-generating LLM processes retrieved context to produce coherent answers"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks," 2023).

Option B: Invite users to submit long, rather than concise, questions

Encouraging long questions is a user interaction design choice, not a technical component of the chatbot’s architecture. Moreover, long, verbose questions can complicate intent detection and retrieval, reducing efficiency and accuracy—counter to best practices for chatbot design. Concise questions are typically preferred for clarity and performance.

Databricks Reference: While not explicitly stated, Databricks’ "Generative AI Cookbook" emphasizes efficient query processing, implying that simpler, focused inputs improve LLM performance. Inviting long questions doesn’t align with this.

Option C: Vector database

A vector database stores embeddings of the vehicle documents, enabling fast retrieval of relevant information via semantic search. This is critical for a question-answering system with a large document corpus.

Databricks Reference:"Vector databases enable scalable retrieval of context from large datasets"("Databricks Generative AI Engineer Guide").

Option D: Embedding model

An embedding model converts text (documents and queries) into vector representations for similarity search. It’s a foundational component for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in chatbots.

Databricks Reference:"Embedding models transform text into vectors, facilitating efficient matching of queries to documents"("Building LLM-Powered Applications").

Conclusion: Option B is not a usefulcomponentin building the chatbot. It’s a user-facing suggestion rather than a technical building block, and it could even degrade performance by introducing unnecessary complexity. Options A, C, and D are all integral to a Databricks-aligned chatbot architecture.

When deploying an LLM application for customer service inquiries, the primary focus is on measuring the operational efficiency and quality of the responses. Here's whyAis the correct metric:

Number of customer inquiries processed per unit of time: This metric tracks the throughput of the customer service system, reflecting how many customer inquiries the LLM application can handle in a given time period (e.g., per minute or hour). High throughput is crucial in customer service applications where quick response times are essential to user satisfaction and business efficiency.

Real-time performance monitoring: Monitoring the number of queries processed is an important part of ensuring that the model is performing well under load, especially during peak traffic times. It also helps ensure the system scales properly to meet demand.

Why other options are not ideal:

B. Energy usage per query: While energy efficiency is a consideration, it is not the primary concern for a customer-facing application where user experience (i.e., fast and accurate responses) is critical.

C. Final perplexity scores for the training of the model: Perplexity is a metric for model training, but it doesn't reflect the real-time operational performance of an LLM in production.

D. HuggingFace Leaderboard values for the base LLM: The HuggingFace Leaderboard is more relevant during model selection and benchmarking. However, it is not a direct measure of the model's performance in a specific customer service application in production.

Focusing on throughput (inquiries processed per unit time) ensures that the LLM application is meeting business needs for fast and efficient customer service responses.

The system answers questions on unfolding news topics using articles and social media, with a concern about toxic outputs from toxic inputs. A guardrail must limit toxicity in the LLM’s responses. Let’s evaluate the options.

Option A: Use only approved social media and news accounts to prevent unexpected toxic data from getting to the LLM

Curating input sources (e.g., verified accounts) reduces exposure to toxic content at the data ingestion stage, directly limiting toxic outputs. This is a proactive guardrail aligned with data quality control.

Databricks Reference:"Control input data quality to mitigate unwanted LLM behavior, such as toxicity"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks," 2023).

Option B: Implement rate limiting

Rate limiting controls request frequency, not content quality. It prevents overload but doesn’t address toxicity in social media inputs or outputs.

Databricks Reference: Rate limiting is for performance, not safety:"Use rate limits to manage compute load"("Generative AI Cookbook").

Option C: Reduce the amount of context items the system will include in consideration for its response

Reducing context might limit exposure to some toxic items but risks losing relevant information, and it doesn’t specifically target toxicity. It’s an indirect, imprecise fix.

Databricks Reference: Context reduction is for efficiency, not safety:"Adjust context size based on performance needs"("Databricks Generative AI Engineer Guide").

Option D: Log all LLM system responses and perform a batch toxicity analysis monthly

Logging and analyzing responses is reactive, identifying toxicity after it occurs rather than preventing it. Monthly analysis doesn’t limit real-time toxic outputs.

Databricks Reference: Monitoring is for auditing, not prevention:"Log outputs for post-hoc analysis, but use input filters for safety"("Building LLM-Powered Applications").

Conclusion: Option A is the most effective guardrail, proactively filtering toxic inputs from unverified sources, which aligns with Databricks’ emphasis on data quality as a primary safety mechanism for LLM systems.

To optimize a chunking strategy for a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application, the Generative AI Engineer needs a structured approach to evaluating the chunking strategy, ensuring that the chosen configuration retrieves the most relevant information and leads to accurate and coherent LLM responses. Here's whyCandEare the correct strategies:

Strategy C: Evaluation Metrics (Recall, NDCG)

Define an evaluation metric: Common evaluation metrics such as recall, precision, or NDCG (Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain) measure how well the retrieved chunks match the user's query and the expected response.

Recallmeasures the proportion of relevant information retrieved.

NDCGis often used when you want to account for both the relevance of retrieved chunks and the ranking or order in which they are retrieved.

Experiment with chunking strategies: Adjusting chunking strategies based on text structure (e.g., splitting by paragraph, chapter, or a fixed number of tokens) allows the engineer to experiment with various ways of slicing the text. Some chunks may better align with the user's query than others.

Evaluate performance: By using recall or NDCG, the engineer can methodically test various chunking strategies to identify which one yields the highest performance. This ensures that the chunking method provides the most relevant information when embedding and retrieving data from the vector store.

Strategy E: LLM-as-a-Judge Metric

Use the LLM as an evaluator: After retrieving chunks, the LLM can be used to evaluate the quality of answers based on the chunks provided. This could be framed as a "judge" function, where the LLM compares how well a given chunk answers previous user queries.

Optimize based on the LLM's judgment: By having the LLM assess previous answers and rate their relevance and accuracy, the engineer can collect feedback on how well different chunking configurations perform in real-world scenarios.

This metric could be a qualitative judgment on how closely the retrieved information matches the user's intent.

Tune chunking parameters: Based on the LLM's judgment, the engineer can adjust the chunk size or structure to better align with the LLM's responses, optimizing retrieval for future queries.

By combining these two approaches, the engineer ensures that the chunking strategy is systematically evaluated using both quantitative (recall/NDCG) and qualitative (LLM judgment) methods. This balanced optimization process results in improved retrieval relevance and, consequently, better response generation by the LLM.

For a small, cost-conscious startup in the cancer research field, choosing a domain-specific and smaller LLM is the most effective strategy. Here's whyBis the best choice:

Domain-specific performance: A smaller LLM that has been fine-tuned for the domain of cancer research will outperform a general-purpose LLM for specialized queries. This ensures high-quality responses without needing to rely on a large, expensive LLM.

Cost-efficiency: Smaller models are cheaper to run, both in terms of compute resources and API usage costs. A domain-specific smaller LLM can deliver good quality responses without the need for the extensive computational power required by larger models.

Focused knowledge: In a specialized field like cancer research, having an LLM tailored to the subject matter provides better relevance and accuracy for queries, while keeping costs low. Large, general-purpose LLMs may provide irrelevant information, leading to inefficiency and higher costs.

This approach allows the startup to balance quality, cost, and customer satisfaction effectively, making it the most suitable strategy.

The task is to set up a Databricks Vector Search index for news articles, supporting queries like “monster truck news around January 5th, 1992,” with minimal effort. The index must filter by topic and a 10-day date range. Let’s evaluate the options.

Option A: Split articles by 10-day blocks and return the block closest to the query

Pre-splitting articles into 10-day blocks requires significant preprocessing and index management (e.g., one index per block). It’s effort-intensive and inflexible for dynamic date ranges.

Databricks Reference:"Static partitioning increases setup complexity; metadata filtering is preferred"("Databricks Vector Search Documentation").

Option B: Include metadata columns for article date and topic to support metadata filtering

Adding date and topic as metadata in the Vector Search index allows dynamic filtering (e.g., date ± 5 days, topic = “monster truck”) at query time. This leverages Databricks’ built-in metadata filtering, minimizing setup effort.

Databricks Reference:"Vector Search supports metadata filtering on columns like date or category for precise retrieval with minimal preprocessing"("Vector Search Guide," 2023).

Option C: Pass the query directly to the vector search index and return the best articles

Passing the full query (e.g., “Tell me about monster truck news around January 5th, 1992”) to Vector Search relies solely on embeddings, ignoring structured filtering for date and topic. This risks inaccurate results without explicit range logic.

Databricks Reference:"Pure vector similarity may not handle temporal or categorical constraints effectively"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks").

Option D: Create separate indexes by topic and add a classifier model to appropriately pick the best index

Separate indexes per topic plus a classifier model adds significant complexity (index creation, model training, maintenance), far exceeding “least effort.” It’s overkill for this use case.

Databricks Reference:"Multiple indexes increase overhead; single-index with metadata is simpler"("Databricks Vector Search Documentation").

Conclusion: Option B is the simplest and most effective solution, using metadata filtering in a single Vector Search index to handle date ranges and topics, aligning with Databricks’ emphasis on efficient, low-effort setups.

The task described in the question involves enhancing customer experience by automatically handling common customer inquiries using an LLM-powered AI solution. This requires the system to process input data (customer inquiries) and generate personalized, relevant responses efficiently. Let’s evaluate the options step-by-step in the context of Databricks Generative AI Engineer principles, which emphasize leveraging LLMs for tasks like question answering, summarization, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Option A: Input: Customer reviews; Output: Group the reviews by users and aggregate per-user average rating, then respond

This option focuses on analyzing customer reviews to compute average ratings per user. While this might be useful for sentiment analysis or user profiling, it does not directly address the goal of handling common customer inquiries or improving response times for personalized interactions. Customer reviews are typically feedback data, not real-time inquiries requiring immediate responses.

Databricks Reference: Databricks documentation on LLMs (e.g., "Building LLM Applications with Databricks") emphasizes that LLMs excel at tasks like question answering and conversational responses, not just aggregation or statistical analysis of reviews.

Option B: Input: Customer service chat logs; Output: Group the chat logs by users, followed by summarizing each user's interactions, then respond

This option uses chat logs as input, which aligns with customer service scenarios. However, the output—grouping by users and summarizing interactions—focuses on user-specific summaries rather than directly addressing inquiries. While summarization is an LLM capability, this approach lacks the specificity of finding answers to common questions, which is central to the problem.

Databricks Reference: Per Databricks’ "Generative AI Cookbook," LLMs can summarize text, but for customer service, the emphasis is on retrieval and response generation (e.g., RAG workflows) rather than user interaction summaries alone.

Option C: Input: Customer service chat logs; Output: Find the answers to similar questions and respond with a summary

This option uses chat logs (real customer inquiries) as input and tasks the LLM with identifying answers to similar questions, then providing a summarized response. This directly aligns with the goal of handling common inquiries efficiently while maintaining personalization (by referencing past interactions or similar cases). It leverages LLM capabilities like semantic search, retrieval, and response generation, which are core to Databricks’ LLM workflows.

Databricks Reference: From Databricks documentation ("Building LLM-Powered Applications," 2023), an exact extract states:"For customer support use cases, LLMs can be used to retrieve relevant answers from historical data like chat logs and generate concise, contextually appropriate responses."This matches Option C’s approach of finding answers and summarizing them.

Option D: Input: Customer reviews; Output: Classify review sentiment

This option focuses on sentiment classification of reviews, which is a valid LLM task but unrelated to handling customer inquiries or improving response times in a conversational context. It’s more suited for feedback analysis than real-time customer service.

Databricks Reference: Databricks’ "Generative AI Engineer Guide" notes that sentiment analysis is a common LLM task, but it’s not highlighted for real-time conversational applications like customer support.

Conclusion: Option C is the best fit because it uses relevant input (chat logs) and defines an LLM task (finding answers and summarizing) that meets the requirements of improving response times and maintaining personalized interaction. This aligns with Databricks’ recommended practices for LLM-powered customer service solutions, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows.

To fix the error in the LangChain code provided for using a simple prompt template, the correct approach is Option C. Here's a detailed breakdown of why Option C is the right choice and how it addresses the issue:

Proper Initialization: In Option C, the LLMChain is correctly initialized with the LLM instance specified as OpenAI(), which likely represents a language model (like GPT) from OpenAI. This is crucial as it specifies which model to use for generating responses.

Correct Use of Classes and Methods:

The PromptTemplate is defined with the correct format, specifying that adjective is a variable within the template. This allows dynamic insertion of values into the template when generating text.

The prompt variable is properly linked with the PromptTemplate, and the final template string is passed correctly.

The LLMChain correctly references the prompt and the initialized OpenAI() instance, ensuring that the template and the model are properly linked for generating output.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

Option A: Misuses the parameter passing in generate method by incorrectly structuring the dictionary.

Option B: Incorrectly uses prompt.format method which does not exist in the context of LLMChain and PromptTemplate configuration, resulting in potential errors.

Option D: Incorrect order and setup in the initialization parameters for LLMChain, which would likely lead to a failure in recognizing the correct configuration for prompt and LLM usage.

Thus, Option C is correct because it ensures that the LangChain components are correctly set up and integrated, adhering to proper syntax and logical flow required by LangChain's architecture. This setup avoids common pitfalls such as type errors or method misuses, which are evident in other options.

When addressing concerns of hallucination and data leakage in an LLM application for internal company policies, fine-tuning the model on internal data with the hope it learns data boundaries can be problematic:

Risk of Data Leakage: Fine-tuning on sensitive or confidential data does not guarantee that the model will not inadvertently include or reference this data in its outputs. There’s a risk of overfitting to the specific data details, which might lead to unintended leakage.

Hallucination: Fine-tuning does not necessarily mitigate the model's tendency to hallucinate; in fact, it might exacerbate it if the training data is not comprehensive or representative of all potential queries.

Better Approaches:

A,C, andDinvolve setting up operational safeguards and constraints that directly address data leakage and ensure responses are aligned with specific user needs and security levels.

Fine-tuning lacks the targeted control needed for such sensitive applications and can introduce new risks, making it an unsuitable approach in this context.

ï‚· Problem Context: The goal is to monitor theserving endpointfor incoming requests and outgoing responses in aprovisioned throughput model serving endpointwithin aRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application. The current approach involves using a microservice to log requests and responses to a remote server, but the Generative AI Engineer is looking for a more streamlined solution within Databricks.

ï‚· Explanation of Options:

Option A: Vector Search: This feature is used to perform similarity searches within vector databases. It doesn’t provide functionality for logging or monitoring requests and responses in a serving endpoint, so it’s not applicable here.

Option B: Lakeview: Lakeview is not a feature relevant to monitoring or logging request-response cycles for serving endpoints. It might be more related to viewing data in Databricks Lakehouse but doesn’t fulfill the specific monitoring requirement.

Option C: DBSQL: Databricks SQL (DBSQL) is used for running SQL queries on data stored in Databricks, primarily for analytics purposes. It doesn’t provide the direct functionality needed to monitor requests and responses in real-time for an inference endpoint.

Option D: Inference Tables: This is the correct answer.Inference Tablesin Databricks are designed to store the results and metadata of inference runs. This allows the system to logincoming requests and outgoing responsesdirectly within Databricks, making it an ideal choice for monitoring the behavior of a provisioned serving endpoint. Inference Tables can be queried and analyzed, enabling easier monitoring and debugging compared to a custom microservice.

Thus,Inference Tablesare the optimal feature for monitoring request and response logs within the Databricks infrastructure for a model serving endpoint.