TextGrad: Automatic "Differentiation" via Text
Authors: name: Mert Yuksekgonul, name: Federico Bianchi, name: Joseph Boen, name: Sheng Liu, name: Zhi Huang, name: Carlos Guestrin, name: James Zou

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift, with breakthroughs achieved by systems
orchestrating multiple large language models (LLMs) and other complex
components. As a result, developing principled and automated optimization
methods for compound AI systems is one of the most important new challenges.
Neural networks faced a similar challenge in its early days until
backpropagation and automatic differentiation transformed the field by making
optimization turn-key. Inspired by this, we introduce TextGrad, a powerful
framework performing automatic ``differentiation'' via text. TextGrad
backpropagates textual feedback provided by LLMs to improve individual
components of a compound AI system. In our framework, LLMs provide rich,
general, natural language suggestions to optimize variables in computation
graphs, ranging from code snippets to molecular structures. TextGrad follows
PyTorch's syntax and abstraction and is flexible and easy-to-use. It works
out-of-the-box for a variety of tasks, where the users only provide the
objective function without tuning components or prompts of the framework. We
showcase TextGrad's effectiveness and generality across a diverse range of
applications, from question answering and molecule optimization to radiotherapy
treatment planning. Without modifying the framework, TextGrad improves the
zero-shot accuracy of GPT-4o in Google-Proof Question Answering from 51% to
55%, yields 20% relative performance gain in optimizing LeetCode-Hard
coding problem solutions, improves prompts for reasoning, designs new druglike
small molecules with desirable in silico binding, and designs radiation
oncology treatment plans with high specificity. TextGrad lays a foundation to
accelerate the development of the next-generation of AI systems.