Indic-LLMLingua: Query-Aware Hindi Prompt Compression in RAG

A deep learning project codebase for the Data Science & AI Labs course at IIT Madras (Group 9). This repository implements Indic-LLMLingua, a cross-lingual query-aware token classification pipeline for context compression in Hindi Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications.

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📖 Project Objective

The primary objective of this project is to build a Cross-Lingual Query-Aware Token Classifier that compresses extensive prompt contexts in Hindi-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.

Existing state-of-the-art prompt compressors (like LLMLingua-2) suffer from two major flaws when deployed in regional contexts:

1. Morphological Destruction: English-centric training results in arbitrary word fragmentation and grammatical degradation when applied zero-shot to morphologically rich Indic languages like Hindi.
2. Task-Agnostic Information Loss: Existing classifiers discard tokens independently of the user's question, causing catastrophic dropping of key facts required to answer the query.

By leveraging Query-Aware Bidirectional Encoder Representations trained on distilled regional datasets, this project ensures that context compression preserves native grammatical syntax and retains query-relevant facts.

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🛠️ Methodology & Pipeline Architecture

The pipeline consists of four major sequential stages:

graph TD
    A[Hugging Face Parquet: IndicQA Hindi] -->|fetch_data.py| B[Raw Data: data/raw_hindi_qa.json]
    B -->|distill.py| C[Qwen-3.5-397B Teacher LLM]
    C -->|Generative Compression temp=0.1| D[Compressed Hindi Output]
    D -->|Whitespace Alignment| E[Binary Labels 0/1]
    E -->|Resilient Write| F[data/master_processed_data.jsonl]
    F -->|validate_data.py| G[Validation Metrics & Splitting]

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1. Data Extraction

• Source: The Hindi validation subset of the AI4Bharat IndicQA benchmark is fetched directly via Hugging Face Parquet storage.
• Extraction: The script fetch_data.py compiles context paragraphs, user questions, and ground-truth answer spans into structured context-question-answer triples saved in data/raw_hindi_qa.json.

2. LLM Distillation

• Teacher Model: qwen/qwen3.5-397b-a17b (Alibaba's frontier Mixture-of-Experts model, highly optimized for Indic scripts).
• Execution: Implemented in distill.py (functionally the intelligent distillation script). The teacher model is queried with a low temperature of 0.1 and top_p=0.95. This enforces deterministic pruning, preventing the model from hallucinating or generating new synonyms and ensuring it extracts context segments verbatim.

3. Token Alignment Strategy

• Generative-to-Classification Mapping: The generative output of the Qwen teacher model must be mapped back to individual tokens in the original context.
• Alignment Logic: A whitespace-based tokenization strategy compares tokens in the original context to the set of tokens in the compressed text. Tokens preserved by the LLM are assigned a binary label of 1 (preserve), while dropped tokens are labeled 0 (discard).

4. Pipeline Resiliency & Noise Handling

To ensure uninterrupted data distillation over API endpoints, the pipeline incorporates robust fault tolerance:

• Exponential Backoff: If the API encounters rate-limits (HTTP 429), server timeouts, or connection failures, it sleeps for a duration of $10 \times 2^{\text{attempt}}$ seconds, retrying up to 3 times.
• Safety Filter Protection: Content blocked by LLM safety filters returning None is caught via a custom exception checker, and the row is safely skipped rather than crashing the execution.
• Stateful Resumability: The pipeline checks the output file (data/master_processed_data.jsonl) to count previously completed rows and automatically resumes from the interrupted index, protecting against data duplication and wasting API credits.

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📊 Dataset & Distillation Metrics

The raw dataset sourced from AI4Bharat IndicQA (Hindi subset) contains exactly 1,052 rows. During the distillation process, 65 rows were skipped because the teacher LLM API returned None due to internal safety-filter triggers and security policies blocking the prompts. This resulted in a final dataset of 987 processed rows.

The master dataset of 987 rows was split into training and validation sets using an 80/20 division partitioned by distinct Wikipedia articles to prevent context leakage.

Metric	Training Set (train_indicqa.jsonl)	Validation Set (val_indicqa.jsonl)	Combined Dataset
Total Rows	789	198	987
Average Context Length	498 tokens	489 tokens	496 tokens
Average Compressed Length	19 tokens	20 tokens	19 tokens
Compression Ratio (Reduction %)	96.1%	96.0%	96.1%
Answer Retention Accuracy	90.0%	91.9%	90.4%
Target Label Distribution (1s vs 0s)	~3.82% / 96.18%	~4.09% / 95.91%	~3.87% / 96.13%

Note: Answer Retention measures the percentage of rows where the exact ground-truth answer span is successfully reconstructed from the preserved (Class 1) tokens.

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🔍 Data Distillation & Token Alignment Example

To illustrate how raw query-context pairs are transformed into query-aware token classification targets, consider these actual samples from the validation split (data/val_indicqa.jsonl):

Example 1:

• Question: मुग़ल काल में आवासीय और प्रशासनिक भवन को क्या कहा जाता था? (What were residential and administrative buildings called in the Mughal period?)
• Ground-Truth Answer: दौलतखाना
• Original Context (Sample Segment):

  "... भारत की सबसे बड़ी सामूहिक मस्जिद है, साथ ही आवासीय तथा प्रशासकीय इमारते हैं जिसे दौलतखाना कहते हैं। ..."

• Generative compressed output (Qwen-3.5-397B):

  "शाही जिसमें भारत की सबसे बड़ी सामूहिक मस्जिद है, साथ ही आवासीय तथा प्रशासकीय इमारते हैं जिसे दौलतखाना कहते हैं।"

• Aligned Tokens & Binary Labels:
  • "आवासीय" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "तथा" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "प्रशासकीय" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "इमारते" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "हैं" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "जिसे" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "दौलतखाना" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved) (Contains answer)
  • "कहते" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "हैं।" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • All surrounding context describing the construction years, gardens, and Fatehpur Sikri is labeled 0 (Discarded).

Example 2:

• Question: नाना साहब के पिता कौन थे ? (Who was Nana Saheb's father?)
• Ground-Truth Answer: माधवनारायण राव
• Original Context (Sample Segment):

  "(धोंडू पन्त) नाना साहब ने सन् 1824 में वेणुग्राम निवासी माधवनारायण राव के घर जन्म लिया था। इनके पिता पेशवा बाजीराव द्वितीय के सगोत्र भाई थे।"

• Generative compressed output (Qwen-3.5-397B):

  "नाना साहब के पिता पेशवा बाजीराव द्वितीय के सगोत्र भाई थे।"

• Aligned Tokens & Binary Labels:
  • "नाना" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "साहब" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "के" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "पिता" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "पेशवा" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "बाजीराव" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "द्वितीय" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "के" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "सगोत्र" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "भाई" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • "थे।" $\rightarrow$ 1 (Preserved)
  • The middle tokens describing the birth date 1824 and location वेणुग्राम निवासी are labeled 0 (Discarded).

This illustrates how the pipeline filters out general background noise while keeping the specific context span containing the information required to resolve the query.

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📁 Repository Structure

├── data/                 # Distilled dataset folder (tracked in git)
│   ├── README.md         # Directory conventions
│   ├── train_indicqa.jsonl # Training split (789 rows)
│   └── val_indicqa.jsonl   # Validation split (198 rows)
├── Milestone Files/      # Academic submissions
│   ├── Milestone 1/      # Problem Statement & Lit Review
│   └── Milestone 2/      # Dataset & Pipeline Report
│       └── Milestone_2_Report.md
├── worklog/              # Project contributions and peer review log
│   └── Log.md
├── .gitignore            # Git exclusion rules for weights, cache, and raw data
├── .python-version       # Local Python environment version configuration
├── distill.py            # Context compression, token alignment & distillation pipeline
├── fetch_data.py         # Hugging Face Parquet data extractor script
├── main.py               # Repository execution entrypoint
├── pyproject.toml        # PEP 621 metadata & dependencies manager
├── README.md             # Project documentation (this file)
└── validate_data.py      # Dataset validation and quality evaluator script

Script Directory Reference:

• fetch_data.py: Fetches validation split Parquet from Hugging Face, compiles context-question-answer triples, and saves them to data/raw_hindi_qa.json (987 raw rows).
• distill.py: Connects to the OpenAI-compatible API to prompt the Qwen-3.5 MoE model to compress context, maps generative outputs to binary sequence labels via whitespace tokenization, handles API noise, and generates the master dataset.
• validate_data.py: Reads distilled JSONL files, validates token lengths, measures average prompt compression percentage, and calculates answer retention rates.

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🚀 Getting Started

This project is configured to use uv (a fast Python package and project manager written in Rust) but standard pip and venv are also fully supported.

Prerequisites

• Python >= 3.13 (specified in pyproject.toml)

Option A: Setup using uv (Recommended)

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/blurrydev/Group-9-DS-and-AI-Lab-Project.git
   cd Group-9-DS-and-AI-Lab-Project

2. Install dependencies and sync environment:

   uv sync

3. Configure environment variables: Create a .env file in the root directory:

   API_KEY="your-api-key"
   BASE_URL="api-endpoint-url"

4. Execute pipeline scripts:

   uv run fetch_data.py
   uv run distill.py
   uv run validate_data.py

Option B: Setup using standard pip & venv

1. Create and activate a virtual environment:

   python -m venv .venv
   # Windows (PowerShell)
   .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
   # macOS/Linux
   source .venv/bin/activate

2. Install the package in editable mode:

   pip install -e .

3. Run scripts:

   python fetch_data.py
   python distill.py
   python validate_data.py

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🤝 Collaboration & Contribution Guidelines

• Model Weights: Do NOT commit model weights or checkpoints (.pt, .pth, .ckpt, .safetensors). Save checkpoints locally inside checkpoints/ or outputs/ (configured in .gitignore).
• Jupyter Notebooks: If sharing experiment notebooks, please clear cell outputs before committing to reduce file sizes.
• Large Datasets: Raw files above 50 MB should be placed in raw_data/ or dataset/ (ignored by Git). Only distilled text datasets (JSONL format) go in the data/ folder.