🧩 Reconstruction

A Bifrost is capable of reconstructing the structured output from an LLM, to help ensure that it will pass validation. In the code and docs, this is called “reconstruction” or “autofixing.” Although reconstruction is a general HeimdaLLM concept, This page will explain it concretely in the context of the SQL SELECT Bifrost.

Rationale

The goal of a prompt envelope is to coax an LLM into producing a SQL query that has a high probability of being parsed and validated correctly. Whatever we can do to facilitate a high success rate will result in a better user experience. Otherwise, the end user may see their input frequently rejected due to validation failures that are easy to fix.

While developing the SQLite SELECT Bifrost for HeimdaLLM, I noticed two major sources of validation failures:

  1. Queries with no LIMIT clause, or an incorrect LIMIT clause.

  2. Queries that select columns that are forbidden by the validator.

This is not the fault of the LLM. It’s unreliable and doesn’t always do what you ask. However, frequently failing validation is not a good user experience. To that end, reconstruction was added to repair queries that have simple non-critical issues.

Reconstruction is enabled by default, but it can be disabled on a per-validation basis by passing autofix=False to the Bifrost.traverse method.

Bifrost-specific reconstruction