I credit Omar @lateinteraction.bsky.social for this beautiful summary of the difference 🤣

Hi Tim — Trace can optimize the control flow, whereas DSPy optimizes the modules in a fixed control flow (for now) 🙂 I would use DSPy for a supervised learning setup and Trace for an RL-like task (when there’s a clear definition of reward and feedback).

Trace performs inference-time optimization — not directly updating weights of the underlying neural network. It updates the agentic workflow (python functions, prompts to LLMs and etc)

We are happy to give a talk or have a 1:1 chat if you are interested in learning what Trace is and/or how to use it! Trace has already been presented at the UW Robotics Colloquium and ServiceNow. #foundermode for Open-Source Software! Time to build 🔧 and ship 🚀!

This open-source project is a joint effort with
@chinganc_rl
and Adith, the MSR RL group. We are presenting Trace at the NeurIPS Expo Demo this afternoon 3pm-5pm PT. We have MUGs, T-SHIRTs, and STICKERs!

🌐 microsoft.github.io/Trace/
👨‍💻 github.com/microsoft/Tr...

Once you build an agent with Trace, you can use ANY LLM optimizer you want. With the release of Trace 0.1.3, we introduce TextGrad (github.com/microsoft/Tr...) as an optimizer for the RL agent, along with OPRO and OptoPrime.

What enables Trace to be an RL-style agentic library? We use **Generative Optimization** techniques (LLM as an optimizer) to derive an analog to RL's policy gradient algorithm. The agent makes a move, receives feedback/reward, and updates its parameters.

In Trace, you define an Agent with declarative Python functions using Trace primitives. Trace provides flexible ways to mark what you want to change -- for example, we mark two prompts and two functions below as trainable.

True RL agents learn online -- continuously changing themselves to improve upon the feedback (reward) from a user or an environment. Why haven't people done this in the LLM "Agentic" libraries? We wondered the same and developed Trace -- a true *RL-style* agentic framework.

An honor to have you here!! Welcome 🙏🙏

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Can I get added? Not NLP but still working with LLMs on the RL side.

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Totally — it’s a great list 😊

Hi, I’m one of the main maintainers of Trace: github.com/microsoft/Tr... and will use this platform to promote it and engage with the OSS community 🫡