[core] SequenceController in SamplingParams

[mmoskal]

This is an early work in progress.

This introduces a controller: SequenceController field in SamplingParams. This can be thought of as an extension of the already existing logits_processors (and in fact will work together with it).

The idea is to allow computation of logit token masks in the background, while the GPU is busy with the forward step, as well as token healing, accelerated decoding (aka fast-forward or zero entropy tokens), and hidden tokens (typically stop tokens). This is essentially what's needed for running Guidance stateless grammars on the server.

@simon-mo please let me know if this looks like it's on the right track!

Fast-forward tokens

The fast-forward tokens are handled naturally with BlockManagerV2 since they are used in prefix caching and chunked prefill. They can greatly speed generation of certain data formats (eg., JSON constrained by a schema).

Backtracking

Large parts of this PR deal with backtracking, that is removing a bunch of recently generated tokens.

It is used by token healing in Guidance - the constraints sometimes make the model output tokens in un-natural way. Guidance periodically re-tokenizes the output (bytes) so far with canonical tokenizer. In some cases this requires removing a bunch of tokens from the output and re-inserting new (byte-equivalent) tokens.

Another motivation for this is stop tokens in Guidance - for example f'Here's a joke: {gen(stop="\n")}; Score: {gen(regex=r"\d")}' - here the LLM generates a joke "Something funny\n" and stops at a newline, however when generating score it should see "Here's a joke: Something funny; Score: ".

Certain implementations of token healing also require it (though not the current one in Guidance). (edited text above - Guidance actually uses this)

Another motivation is when you want the LLM to do several independent, related tasks - after the context prompt, you ask for the first task, generate answer, backtrack away the answer and first task question, and continue. This is sometimes also used for XPIA mitigations, where you want to hide untrusted input when generating certain tokens.

Current implementation also uses backtrack when the controller requests a "no-op" (i.e., a backtrack of 0 with empty tokens to append) - this typically means that the controller run out of time computing token masks and wants to sit out a step (this shouldn't happen very often, but would otherwise block other sequences).

The reason backtracking is not a separate PR is that the SequenceController will allow for unit tests for it.

AICI and Guidance

AICI (minus forks) can be implemented on top of this, so this supersedes #2888. There's an ongoing work on Guidance Controller in AICI.

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[tdene]

sampling_params imports sequence_controller

sequence_controller imports sequence

sequence imports both sampling_params and sequence_controller

Leading to Python circular import errors. Applying PEP484 to sequence_controller.py is a possible way to patch this.

[mmoskal]

closing in favor of #6273