Databricks-Generative-AI-Engineer-Associate Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate Questions and Answers

When deploying an LLM application for customer service inquiries, the primary focus is on measuring the operational efficiency and quality of the responses. Here's whyAis the correct metric:

Number of customer inquiries processed per unit of time: This metric tracks the throughput of the customer service system, reflecting how many customer inquiries the LLM application can handle in a given time period (e.g., per minute or hour). High throughput is crucial in customer service applications where quick response times are essential to user satisfaction and business efficiency.

Real-time performance monitoring: Monitoring the number of queries processed is an important part of ensuring that the model is performing well under load, especially during peak traffic times. It also helps ensure the system scales properly to meet demand.

Why other options are not ideal:

B. Energy usage per query: While energy efficiency is a consideration, it is not the primary concern for a customer-facing application where user experience (i.e., fast and accurate responses) is critical.

C. Final perplexity scores for the training of the model: Perplexity is a metric for model training, but it doesn't reflect the real-time operational performance of an LLM in production.

D. HuggingFace Leaderboard values for the base LLM: The HuggingFace Leaderboard is more relevant during model selection and benchmarking. However, it is not a direct measure of the model's performance in a specific customer service application in production.

Focusing on throughput (inquiries processed per unit time) ensures that the LLM application is meeting business needs for fast and efficient customer service responses.

The task involves improving a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application’s performance by experimenting with embedding models. The choice of embedding model impacts retrieval accuracy,which is critical for RAG systems. Let’s evaluate the options based on Databricks Generative AI Engineer best practices.

Option A: Pick an embedding model trained on related domain knowledge

Embedding models trained on domain-specific data (e.g., industry-specific corpora) produce vectors that better capture the semantics of the application’s context, improving retrieval relevance. For RAG, this is a key strategy to enhance performance.

Databricks Reference:"For optimal retrieval in RAG systems, select embedding models aligned with the domain of your data"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks," 2023).

Option B: Pick the most recent and most performant open LLM released at the time

LLMs are not embedding models; they generate text, not embeddings for retrieval. While recent LLMs may be performant for generation, this doesn’t address the embedding step in RAG. This option misunderstands the component being selected.

Databricks Reference: Embedding models and LLMs are distinct in RAG workflows:"Embedding models convert text to vectors, while LLMs generate responses"("Generative AI Cookbook").

Option C: Pick the embedding model ranked highest on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) leaderboard hosted by HuggingFace

The MTEB leaderboard ranks models across general tasks, but high overall performance doesn’t guarantee suitability for a specific domain. A top-ranked model might excel in generic contexts but underperform on the engineer’s unique data.

Databricks Reference: General performance is less critical than domain fit:"Benchmark rankings provide a starting point, but domain-specific evaluation is recommended"("Databricks Generative AI Engineer Guide").

Option D: Pick an embedding model with multilingual support to support potential multilingual user questions

Multilingual support is useful only if the application explicitly requires it. Without evidence of multilingual needs, this adds complexity without guaranteed performance gains for the current use case.

Databricks Reference:"Choose features like multilingual support based on application requirements"("Building LLM-Powered Applications").

Conclusion: Option A is the best strategy because it prioritizes domain relevance, directly improving retrieval accuracy in a RAG system—aligning with Databricks’ emphasis on tailoring models to specific use cases.

Problem Context: The engineer needs to extract text from PDF documents, which may contain both text and images. The goal is to find a Python package that simplifies this task using the least amount of code.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: flask: Flask is a web framework for Python, not suitable for processing or extracting content from PDFs.

Option B: beautifulsoup: Beautiful Soup is designed for parsing HTML and XML documents, not PDFs.

Option C: unstructured: This Python package is specifically designed to work with unstructured data, including extracting text from PDFs. It provides functionalities to handle various types of content in documents with minimal coding, making it ideal for the task.

Option D: numpy: Numpy is a powerful library for numerical computing in Python and does not provide any tools for text extraction from PDFs.

Given the requirement,Option C(unstructured) is the most appropriate as it directly addresses the need to efficiently extract text from PDF documents with minimal code.

The problem describes a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for HR policy Q&A where responses are incomplete and unstructured due to the retriever failing to return sufficient context. The engineer has already tried different embedding and response-generating LLMs without success, suggesting the issue lies in the retrieval process—specifically, how documents are chunked and indexed. Let’s evaluate the options.

Option A: Add the section header as a prefix to chunks

Adding section headers provides additional context to each chunk, helping the retriever understand the chunk’s relevance within the document structure (e.g., “Leave Policy: Annual Leave” vs. just “Annual Leave”). This can improve retrieval precision for structured HR policies.

Databricks Reference:"Metadata, such as section headers, can be appended to chunks to enhance retrieval accuracy in RAG systems"("Databricks Generative AI Cookbook," 2023).

Option B: Increase the document chunk size

Larger chunks include more context per retrieval, reducing the chance of missing relevant information split across smaller chunks. For structured HR policies, this can ensure entire sections or rules are retrieved together.

Databricks Reference:"Increasing chunk size can improve context completeness, though it may trade off with retrieval specificity"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks").

Option C: Split the document by sentence

Splitting by sentence creates very small chunks, which could exacerbate the problem by fragmenting context further. This is likely why the current system fails—it retrieves incomplete snippets rather than cohesive policy sections.

Databricks Reference: No specific extract opposes this, but the emphasis on context completeness in RAG suggests smaller chunks worsen incomplete responses.

Option D: Use a larger embedding model

A larger embedding model might improve vector quality, but the question states that experimenting with different embedding models didn’t help. This suggests the issue isn’t embedding quality but rather chunking/retrieval strategy.

Databricks Reference: Embedding models are critical, but not the focus when retrieval context is the bottleneck.

Option E: Fine tune the response generation model

Fine-tuning the LLM could improve response coherence, but if the retriever doesn’t provide complete context, the LLM can’t generate full answers. The root issue is retrieval, not generation.

Databricks Reference: Fine-tuning is recommended for domain-specific generation, not retrieval fixes ("Generative AI Engineer Guide").

Conclusion: Options A and B address the retrieval issue directly by enhancing chunk context—either through metadata (A) or size (B)—aligning with Databricks’ RAG optimization strategies. C would worsen the problem, while D and E don’t target the root cause given prior experimentation.

In the context of developing a chatbot for a company's internal HelpDesk Call Center, the key is to select data sources that provide the most contextual and detailed information about the issues being addressed. This includes identifying the root cause and suggesting resolutions. The two most appropriate sources from the list are:

Call Detail (Option D):

Contents: This Delta table includes a snapshot of all call details updated hourly, featuring essential fields like root_cause and resolution.

Relevance: The inclusion of root_cause and resolution fields makes this source particularly valuable, as it directly contains the information necessary to understand and resolve the issues discussed in the calls. Even if some records are incomplete, the data provided is crucial for a chatbot aimed at speeding up resolution identification.

Transcript Volume (Option E):

Contents: This Unity Catalog Volume contains recordings in .wav format and text transcripts in .txt files.

Relevance: The text transcripts of call recordings can provide in-depth context that the chatbot can analyze to understand the nuances of each issue. The chatbot can use natural language processing techniques to extract themes, identify problems, and suggest resolutions based on previous similar interactions documented in the transcripts.

Why Other Options Are Less Suitable:

A (Call Cust History): While it provides insights into customer interactions with the HelpDesk, it focuses more on the usage metrics rather than the content of the calls or the issues discussed.

B (Maintenance Schedule): This data is useful for understanding when services may not be available but does not contribute directly to resolving user issues or identifying root causes.

C (Call Rep History): Though it offers data on call durations and start times, which could help in assessing performance, it lacks direct information on the issues being resolved.

Therefore, Call Detail and Transcript Volume are the most relevant data sources for a chatbot designed to assist with identifying and resolving issues in a HelpDesk Call Center setting, as they provide direct and contextual information related to customer issues.

To understand how a typical RAG-enabled customer-facing chatbot processes a user's question, let’s go through the correct sequence as depicted in the diagram and explained in option A:

Embedding Model (1):The first step involves the user's question being processed through an embedding model. This model converts the text into a vector format that numerically represents the text. This step is essential for allowing the subsequent vector search to operate effectively.

Vector Search (2):The vectors generated by the embedding model are then used in a vector search mechanism. This search identifies the most relevant documents or previously answered questions that are stored in a vector format in a database.

Context-Augmented Prompt (3):The information retrieved from the vector search is used to create a context-augmented prompt. This step involves enhancing the basic user query with additional relevant information gathered to ensure the generated response is as accurate and informative as possible.

Response-Generating LLM (4):Finally, the context-augmented prompt is fed into a response-generating large language model (LLM). This LLM uses the prompt to generate a coherent and contextually appropriate answer, which is then delivered as the final output to the user.

Why Other Options Are Less Suitable:

B, C, D: These options suggest incorrect sequences that do not align with how a RAG system typically processes queries. They misplace the role of embedding models, vector search, and response generation in an order that would not facilitate effective information retrieval and response generation.

Thus, the correct sequence isembedding model, vector search, context-augmented prompt, response-generating LLM, which is option A.

The task is to deploy an LLM application using Foundation Model APIs in a production environment while adhering to security best practices. Authentication is critical for securing access to Databricks resources, such as the Foundation Model API. Let’s evaluate the options based on Databricks’ security guidelines for production scenarios.

Option A: Use an access token belonging to service principals

Service principals are non-human identities designed for automated workflows and applications in Databricks. Using an access token tied to a service principal ensures that the authentication is scoped to the application, follows least-privilege principles (via role-based access control), and avoids reliance on individual user credentials. This is a security best practice for production deployments.

Databricks Reference:"For production applications, use service principals with access tokens to authenticate securely, avoiding user-specific credentials"("Databricks Security Best Practices," 2023). Additionally, the "Foundation Model API Documentation" states:"Service principal tokens are recommended for programmatic access to Foundation Model APIs."

Option B: Use a frequently rotated access token belonging to either a workspace user or a service principal

Frequent rotation enhances security by limiting token exposure, but tying the token to a workspace user introduces risks (e.g., user account changes, broader permissions). Including both user and service principal options dilutes the focus on application-specific security, making this less ideal than a service-principal-only approach. It also adds operational overhead without clear benefits over Option A.

Databricks Reference:"While token rotation is a good practice, service principals are preferred over user accounts for application authentication"("Managing Tokens in Databricks," 2023).

Option C: Use OAuth machine-to-machine authentication

OAuth M2M (e.g., client credentials flow) is a secure method for application-to-service communication, often using service principals under the hood. However, Databricks’ Foundation Model API primarily supports personal access tokens (PATs) or service principal tokens over full OAuth flows for simplicity in production setups. OAuth M2M adds complexity (e.g., managing refresh tokens) without a clear advantage in this context.

Databricks Reference:"OAuth is supported in Databricks, but service principal tokens are simpler and sufficient for most API-based workloads"("Databricks Authentication Guide," 2023).

Option D: Use an access token belonging to any workspace user

Using a user’s access token ties the application to an individual’s identity, violating security best practices. It risks exposure if the user leaves, changes roles, or has overly broad permissions, and it’s not scalable or auditable for production.

Databricks Reference:"Avoid using personal user tokens for production applications due to security and governance concerns"("Databricks Security Best Practices," 2023).

Conclusion: Option A is the best choice, as it uses a service principal’s access token, aligning with Databricks’ security best practices for production LLM applications. It ensures secure, application-specific authentication with minimal complexity, as explicitly recommended for Foundation Model API deployments.

Problem Context: The Generative AI Engineer needs a prompt that will enable an LLM trained on customer call transcripts to classify and respond correctly regarding product availability. The desired response should clearly indicate whether a product is "In Stock" or "Out of Stock," and it should be formatted in a way that is structured and easy to parse programmatically, such as JSON.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: Respond with “In Stock” if the customer asks for a product. This prompt is too generic and does not specify how to handle the case when a product is not available, nor does it provide a structured output format.

Option B: This option is correctly formatted and explicit. It instructs the LLM to respond based on the availability mentioned in the customer call transcript and to format the response in JSON. This structure allows for easy integration into systems that may need to process this information automatically, such as customer service dashboards or databases.

Option C: Respond with “Out of Stock” if the customer asks for a product. Like option A, this prompt is also insufficient as it only covers the scenario where a product is unavailable and does not provide a structured output.

Option D: While this prompt correctly specifies how to respond based on product availability, it lacks the structured output format, making it less suitable for systems that require formatted data for further processing.

Given the requirements for clear, programmatically usable outputs,Option Bis the optimal choice because it provides precise instructions on how to respond and includes a JSON format example for structuring the output, which is ideal for automated systems or further data handling.

Problem Context: The goal is to deploy a trained LLM on Databricks in the simplest and most integrated manner.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: This method involves unnecessary steps like logging the model as a pickle object, which is not the most efficient path in a Databricks environment.

Option B: Logging the model with MLflow during training and then using MLflow’s API to register and start serving the model is straightforward and leverages Databricks’ built-in functionalities for seamless model deployment.

Option C: Building and running a Docker container is a complex and less integrated approach within the Databricks ecosystem.

Option D: Using Flask and Gunicorn is a more manual approach and less integrated compared to the native capabilities of Databricks and MLflow.

OptionBprovides the most straightforward and efficient process, utilizing Databricks’ ecosystem to its full advantage for deploying models.

The task requires an open generative AI model for a transcription (speech-to-text) task where speed is essential. Let’s assess the options based on their suitability for transcription and performance characteristics, referencing Databricks’ approach to model selection.

Option A: Llama-2-70b-chat-hf

Llama-2 is a text-based LLM optimized for chat and text generation, not speech-to-text. It lacks transcription capabilities.

Databricks Reference:"Llama models are designed for natural language generation, not audio processing"("Databricks Model Catalog").

Option B: MPT-30B-Instruct

MPT-30B is another text-based LLM focused on instruction-following and text generation, not transcription. It’s irrelevant for speech-to-text tasks.

Databricks Reference: No specific mention, but MPT is categorized under text LLMs in Databricks’ ecosystem, not audio models.

Option C: DBRX

DBRX, developed by Databricks, is a powerful text-based LLM for general-purpose generation. It doesn’t natively support speech-to-text and isn’t optimized for transcription.

Databricks Reference:"DBRX excels at text generation and reasoning tasks"("Introducing DBRX," 2023)—no mention of audio capabilities.

Option D: whisper-large-v3 (1.6B)

Whisper, developed by OpenAI, is an open-source model specifically designed for speech-to-text transcription. The “large-v3” variant (1.6 billion parameters) balances accuracy and efficiency, with optimizations for speed via quantization or deployment on GPUs—key for the application’s requirements.

Databricks Reference:"For audio transcription, models like Whisper are recommended for their speed and accuracy"("Generative AI Cookbook," 2023). Databricks supports Whisper integration in its MLflow or Lakehouse workflows.

Conclusion: OnlyD. whisper-large-v3is a speech-to-text model, making it the sole suitable choice. Its design prioritizes transcription, and its efficiency (e.g., via optimized inference) meets the speed requirement, aligning with Databricks’ model deployment best practices.

Building a basic LLM-enabled chat application with conversational capabilities, knowledge retrieval, and contextual memory requires specific components that work together to process queries, maintain context, and retrieve relevant information. Databricks’ Generative AI Engineer documentation outlines key components for such systems, particularly in the context of frameworks like LangChain or Databricks’ MosaicML integrations. Let’s evaluate the required components:

Understanding the Requirements:

Conversational capabilities: The app must generate natural, coherent responses.

Knowledge retrieval: It must access external or domain-specific knowledge.

Contextual memory: It must remember prior interactions in the conversation.

Databricks Reference:"A typical LLM chat application includes a memory component to track conversation history and a retrieval mechanism to incorporate external knowledge"("Databricks Generative AI Cookbook," 2023).

Evaluating the Options:

A. (Q): This appears incomplete or unclear (possibly a typo). Without further context, it’s not a valid component.

B. Vector Stores: These store embeddings of documents or knowledge bases, enabling semantic search and retrieval of relevant information for the LLM. This is critical for knowledge retrieval in a chat application.

Databricks Reference:"Vector stores, such as those integrated with Databricks’ Lakehouse, enable efficient retrieval of contextual data for LLMs"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks").

C. Conversation Buffer Memory: This component stores the conversation history, allowing the LLM to maintain context across multiple turns. It’s essential for contextual memory.

Databricks Reference:"Conversation Buffer Memory tracks prior user inputs and LLM outputs, ensuring context-aware responses"("Generative AI Engineer Guide").

D. External tools: These (e.g., APIs or calculators) enhance functionality but aren’t required for abasicchat app with the specified capabilities.

E. Chat loaders: These might refer to data loaders for chat logs, but they’re not a core chain component for conversational functionality or memory.

F. React Components: These relate to front-end UI development, not the LLM chain’s backend functionality.

Selecting the Two Required Components:

Forknowledge retrieval, Vector Stores (B) are necessary to fetch relevant external data, a cornerstone of Databricks’ RAG-based chat systems.

Forcontextual memory, Conversation Buffer Memory (C) is required to maintain conversation history, ensuring coherent and context-aware responses.

While an LLM itself is implied as the core generator, the question asks for chain components beyond the model, making B and C the minimal yet sufficient pair for a basic application.

Conclusion: The two required chain components areB. Vector StoresandC. Conversation Buffer Memory, as they directly address knowledge retrieval and contextual memory, respectively, aligning with Databricks’ documented best practices for LLM-enabled chat applications.

The system answers questions on unfolding news topics using articles and social media, with a concern about toxic outputs from toxic inputs. A guardrail must limit toxicity in the LLM’s responses. Let’s evaluate the options.

Option A: Use only approved social media and news accounts to prevent unexpected toxic data from getting to the LLM

Curating input sources (e.g., verified accounts) reduces exposure to toxic content at the data ingestion stage, directly limiting toxic outputs. This is a proactive guardrail aligned with data quality control.

Databricks Reference:"Control input data quality to mitigate unwanted LLM behavior, such as toxicity"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks," 2023).

Option B: Implement rate limiting

Rate limiting controls request frequency, not content quality. It prevents overload but doesn’t address toxicity in social media inputs or outputs.

Databricks Reference: Rate limiting is for performance, not safety:"Use rate limits to manage compute load"("Generative AI Cookbook").

Option C: Reduce the amount of context items the system will include in consideration for its response

Reducing context might limit exposure to some toxic items but risks losing relevant information, and it doesn’t specifically target toxicity. It’s an indirect, imprecise fix.

Databricks Reference: Context reduction is for efficiency, not safety:"Adjust context size based on performance needs"("Databricks Generative AI Engineer Guide").

Option D: Log all LLM system responses and perform a batch toxicity analysis monthly

Logging and analyzing responses is reactive, identifying toxicity after it occurs rather than preventing it. Monthly analysis doesn’t limit real-time toxic outputs.

Databricks Reference: Monitoring is for auditing, not prevention:"Log outputs for post-hoc analysis, but use input filters for safety"("Building LLM-Powered Applications").

Conclusion: Option A is the most effective guardrail, proactively filtering toxic inputs from unverified sources, which aligns with Databricks’ emphasis on data quality as a primary safety mechanism for LLM systems.

To design an LLM-based application that can answer employee HR questions using HR PDF documentation, the most effective approach is option D. Here's why:

Chunking and Vector Store Embedding:HR documentation tends to be lengthy, so splitting it into smaller, manageable chunks helps optimize retrieval. These chunks are then embedded into avector store(a database that stores vector representations of text). Each chunk of text is transformed into anembeddingusing a transformer-based model, which allows for efficient similarity-based retrieval.

Using Vector Search for Retrieval:When an employee asks a question, the system converts their query into an embedding as well. This embedding is then compared with the embeddings of the document chunks in the vector store. The most semantically similar chunks are retrieved, which ensures that the answer is based on the most relevant parts of the documentation.

LLM to Generate a Response:Once the relevant chunks are retrieved, these chunks are passed into the LLM, which uses them as context to generate a coherent and accurate response to the employee's question.

Why Other Options Are Less Suitable:

A (Calculate Averaged Embeddings): Averaging embeddings might dilute important information. It doesn't provide enough granularity to focus on specific sections of documents.

B (Summarize HR Documentation): Summarization loses the detail necessary for HR-related queries, which are often specific. It would likely miss the mark for more detailed inquiries.

C (Interaction Matrix and ALS): This approach is better suited for recommendation systems and not for HR queries, as it’s focused on collaborative filtering rather than text-based retrieval.

Thus, option D is the most effective solution for providing precise and contextual answers based on HR documentation.

Problem Context: After switching to a model with a shorter context length, the error message indicating that the prompt token count has exceeded the limit suggests that the input to the model is too large.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: Use a smaller embedding model to generate– This wouldn't necessarily address the issue of prompt size exceeding the model’s token limit.

Option B: Reduce the maximum output tokens of the new model– This option affects the output length, not the size of the input being too large.

Option C: Decrease the chunk size of embedded documents– This would help reduce the size of each document chunk fed into the model, ensuring that the input remains within the model's context length limitations.

Option D: Reduce the number of records retrieved from the vector database– By retrieving fewer records, the total input size to the model can be managed more effectively, keeping it within the allowable token limits.

Option E: Retrain the response generating model using ALiBi– Retraining the model is contrary to the stipulation not to change the response generating model.

OptionsCandDare the most effective solutions to manage the model’s shorter context length without changing the model itself, by adjusting the input size both in terms of individual document size and total documents retrieved.

 Problem Context: The goal is to monitor theserving endpointfor incoming requests and outgoing responses in aprovisioned throughput model serving endpointwithin aRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application. The current approach involves using a microservice to log requests and responses to a remote server, but the Generative AI Engineer is looking for a more streamlined solution within Databricks.

 Explanation of Options:

Option A: Vector Search: This feature is used to perform similarity searches within vector databases. It doesn’t provide functionality for logging or monitoring requests and responses in a serving endpoint, so it’s not applicable here.

Option B: Lakeview: Lakeview is not a feature relevant to monitoring or logging request-response cycles for serving endpoints. It might be more related to viewing data in Databricks Lakehouse but doesn’t fulfill the specific monitoring requirement.

Option C: DBSQL: Databricks SQL (DBSQL) is used for running SQL queries on data stored in Databricks, primarily for analytics purposes. It doesn’t provide the direct functionality needed to monitor requests and responses in real-time for an inference endpoint.

Option D: Inference Tables: This is the correct answer.Inference Tablesin Databricks are designed to store the results and metadata of inference runs. This allows the system to logincoming requests and outgoing responsesdirectly within Databricks, making it an ideal choice for monitoring the behavior of a provisioned serving endpoint. Inference Tables can be queried and analyzed, enabling easier monitoring and debugging compared to a custom microservice.

Thus,Inference Tablesare the optimal feature for monitoring request and response logs within the Databricks infrastructure for a model serving endpoint.