Week 14: LLMs as Decision Makers and Agents
1. LLMs as Decision Makers
- Decision Framework
- Structured output formats
- Decision criteria specification
- Confidence scoring
- Fallback mechanisms
- Use Cases
- Content moderation
- Request classification
- Priority assignment
- Action selection
2. Routing and Workflow Control
- Router Architecture
- Input analysis
- Decision points
- Routing logic
- Feedback loops
- System Integration
- API endpoints
- Queue management
- State tracking
- Error handling
3. Agentic Workflows
- Agent Design
- Goal specification
- Action space definition
- State representation
- Decision boundaries
- Control Flow
- Sequential decisions
- Parallel processing
- Coordination mechanisms
- Conflict resolution
4. Safety and Reliability
- Decision Validation
- Confidence thresholds
- Human oversight
- Decision logging
- Audit trails
- Error Handling
- Edge cases
- Fallback strategies
- Recovery mechanisms
- System boundaries
Required Reading
- "Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models"
- "Constitutional AI: A Framework for Machine Decision Making"
Learning Objectives
- Understand LLMs as decision-making components
- Design robust decision-routing systems
- Implement agentic workflows
- Evaluate decision quality and reliability
- Build safeguards for autonomous systems