Regression in support of customized "role" in OpenAI compatible API (v.0.4.2)

[simon-mo]

Discussed in #4745

^{Originally posted by tanliboy May 10, 2024}
Hi vLLM team,

We have been using vLLM for serving models, and it went really well. We have been using the OpenAI compatible API along with our customized "role" for different entities. However, when we upgraded the version to v0.4.2 recently, we realized that the customized "role" is not supported and the role is only limited to "system", "user", and "assistant".

I understand that it is tightly aligned with OpenAI's chat completion role definition; however, it limits the customization of different roles along with fine-tuning. Moreover, we also saw a trend (including the recent Llama3 chat template) to support different roles for multi-agent interactions.

Can you upgrade to bring back the previous support of customized roles in OpenAI chat completion APIs?

Thanks,
Li

[DarkLight1337]

This is likely the result of #4355, which made ChatCompletionRequest.messages more strict to avoid unrecognized attributes. Would this interface be sufficient for defining custom roles?

class CustomChatCompletionContentPartParam(TypedDict, total=False):
    __pydantic_config__ = ConfigDict(extra="allow")  # type: ignore

    type: Required[str]
    """The type of the content part."""


ChatCompletionContentPartParam = Union[
    openai.types.chat.ChatCompletionContentPartParam,
    CustomChatCompletionContentPartParam]


class CustomChatCompletionMessageParam(TypedDict, total=False):
    """Enables custom roles in the Chat Completion API."""
    role: Required[str]
    """The role of the message's author."""

    content: Union[str, List[ChatCompletionContentPartParam]]
    """The contents of the message."""

    name: str
    """An optional name for the participant.

    Provides the model information to differentiate between participants of the
    same role.
    """


ChatCompletionMessageParam = Union[
    openai.types.chat.ChatCompletionMessageParam,
    CustomChatCompletionMessageParam]


class ChatCompletionRequest(OpenAIBaseModel):
    messages: List[ChatCompletionMessageParam]
    ... # The rest is the same as OpenAI API

[Tostino]

Thank you for the PR @DarkLight1337. Was wondering why my data pipeline stopped working when I just upgraded vLLM.

[tanliboy]

Thank you, @simon-mo, @DarkLight1337 and @Tostino !
Is the PR ready to merge and incorporate into the upcoming release?

[simon-mo]

Merged.