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MatplotLLM, iterative natural language data visualization in org-babel

Abhinav Tushar (he/him) - abhinav@lepisma.xyz, https://lepisma.xyz, @lepisma@mathstodon.xyz, abhinav@lepisma.xyz

Format: 10-min talk ; Q&A: Etherpad
Status: All done

00:00.000 Introduction
01:40.720 What is an LLM?
02:23.600 Using this library
05:11.701 Further instructions
08:00.160 Room for improvement
Duration: 09:34 minutes

Description

Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved in capabilities to an extent where a lot of manual workflows can be automated by just providing natural language instructions.

On such manual work is to create custom visualizations. I have found the process to be really tedious if you want to make something non-standard with common tools like matplotlib or d3. These frameworks provide low level abstractions that you can then use to make your own visualizations.

Earlier to make a new custom visualization, I would open two windows in Emacs, one for code, other for the generated image. In this talk, I will show how a powerful LLM could lead to a much more natural interface where I only need to work with text instructions and feedback on the currently generated plot. The system isn't perfect, but it shows us how the future or such work could look like.

The package is called MatplotLLM and lives here https://github.com/lepisma/matplotllm

About the speaker:

I am a Programmer and Machine Learning Engineer who has been in love with Emacs' extendability from the moment I pressed M-x. Since then, I have been doing as many things inside Emacs as I can. In this talk, I will cover a recent attempt at automating one of my workflows inside Emacs.

Discussion

Questions and answers

Transcript

[00:00:00.000] Introduction
Hi, my name is Abhinav and I'm going to talk about this tool that I've been working on called MatplotLLM. MatplotLLM is a natural language interface over matplotlib, which is a library I use a lot for making visualizations. It's a pretty common Python library used a lot everywhere where there's need of plotting and graphing. I usually use it in reports. Whenever I'm writing a report in org mode, I tend to write a code block which is in Python. And then that code block has usage of matplotlib to produce some reports. That works really well. But at times what happens is I have to make a very custom graph, let's say. And then while I'm writing a report, it's kind of a huge leap of abstraction when I'm working on text versus going into actual low-level matplotlib code to do that graphing. So that's something I don't want to do. Here's an example. This is a graph which is... I think it was made like five or six years back. And then there are some common things like scatter plot here, the dots that you can see here scattered. Then... But there are a few things which, to do them, to make them, you will actually have to go--at least me, I have to go to the documentation and figure out how to do it. Which is fine, but I don't want to do this, you know, spend so much time here, when I'm working on a tight deadline for a report. That's the motivation for this tool. This tool basically allows me to get rid of the complexity of the library by working via an LLM.
[00:01:40.720] What is an LLM?
So an LLM is a large language model. These are models which are trained to produce text, generate text. And just by doing that, they actually end up learning a lot of common patterns. For example, if you ask a question, you can actually get a reasonable response. If you ask to write a code for something, you'll actually get code which can also be very reasonable. So this tool is basically a wrapper that uses an LLM. For the current version, we use GPT-4, which is OpenAI's model. It's not open in the sense of open source. So that's a problem that it has. But for this version, we are going to use that.
[00:02:23.600] Using this library
Using this library is pretty simple. You basically require the library and then you set up your OpenAI API key here. Then you get a code block where you can specify the language as matplotllm. And then what you can do is, you can basically describe what you want in natural language. I'll take this example of this data set. It's called the Health and Wealth of Nations. I think that was the name of a visualization where it was used. This is basically life expectancy, GDP of various countries starting from 1800. I think it goes up to 2000 somewhere. So earlier, I would try to write code which reads this CSV and then does a lot of matplotlib stuff and then finally produces a graph. But with this tool, what I'll do is I'll just provide instructions in two forms. So the first thing I'll do is I'll just describe how the data looks like. So I'll say data is in a file called data.csv, which is this file, by the way, on the right. It looks like the following. I just pasted a few lines from the top, which is enough. Since it's a CSV, there's already a structure to it. But let's say if you have a log file where there's more complexities to be parsed and all, that also works out really well. You just have to describe how the data looks like and the system will figure out how to work with this. Now, let's do the plotting. So what I can do is... Let's start from a very basic plot between life expectancy and GDP per capita. I'll just do this. "Can you make a scatter plot for life expectancy and GDP per capita?" Now, you can see there are some typos, and probably there will be some grammatical mistakes also coming through. But that's all OK, because the models are supposed to handle those kinds of situations really well. So I send the request to the model. Since it's a large model--GPT-4 is really large-- it actually takes a lot of time to get the response back. So this specific response took 17 seconds, which is huge. It's not something you would expect in a local file running on a computer. But I've got what I wanted. Right. So there's a scatter plot here, as you can see below, which is plotting what I specified it to do, though it looks a little dense.
[00:05:11.701] Further instructions
What I can do is I can provide further instructions as feedback. I try to feed back on this. So I can say, "Can you only show points where year is the multiple of 50?" So since it's starting from 1800, the data points, there are too many years, so I'll just try to thin them down a little. Now what's happening in the background is that everything below this last instruction is going out as the context to the model along with the code that it wrote till now. And then this instruction is added on top of it so that it basically modifies the code to make it work according to this instruction. As you can see now, the data points are much fewer. This is what I wanted also. Let's also do a few more things. I want to see the progression through time. So maybe I'll do something like, color more recent years with a darker shade of... Let's change the color map also. Now, this again goes back to the model. Again, everything below before this line is the context along with the current code, and then this instruction is going to the model to make the changes. So now this should happen, I guess. Once this happens. Yeah. So. OK. So we have this new color map, and there's also this change of color. And also there's this range of color from 1800 to 2000, which is a nice addition. Kind of smart. I didn't expect... I didn't exactly ask for it, but it's nice. So there's a couple more things. Let's make it more minimal. "Let's make it more minimal. Can you remove the bounding box?" Also, let's annotate a few points. So I want to annotate the point which has the highest GDP per capita. "Also annotate the point with highest GDP per capita with the country and year." So again, forget about the grammar. The language model works out well. Usually it takes care of all those complexities for you. This is what we have got after that. As you can see, there's the annotation, which is here. I think it's still overlapping, so probably it could be done better, but the box is removed.
[00:08:00.160] Room for improvement
Now, as you can see, the system is... You will be able to see this that the system is not really robust. So the GitHub repository has some examples where it fails miserably, and you'll actually have to go into the code to figure out what's happening. But we do expect that to improve slowly, because the models are improving greatly in performance. This is a very general model. This is not even tuned for this use case. The other thing is that while I was trying to provide feedback, I was still using text here all the time, but it can be made more natural. So, for example, if I have to annotate this particular point, I actually can just point my cursor to it. Emacs has a way to figure out where your mouse pointer is. And with that, you can actually go back into the code and then see which primitive is being drawn here in Matplotlib. So that there is a way to do that. And then, if you do that, then it's really nice to just be able to say put your cursor here and then say something like, "Can you make this? Can you annotate this point?" Because text is, you know... There are limitations to text. And if you're producing an image, you should be able to do that, too. So I do expect that to happen soonish. If not, from the model side, the hack that I mentioned could be made to work. So that will come in in a later version, probably. Anyway, so that's the end of my talk. You can find more details in the repository link. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Captioner: sachac

Questions or comments? Please e-mail abhinav@lepisma.xyz

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