LangChain Custom Project - Student Implementation
Guide
Project Overview
This project focuses on building a custom LangChain application that demonstrates practical
implementation of large language model (LLM) capabilities within a 5-day development
timeline. Students will create an end-to-end solution that showcases LangChain's core
components while working with real-world datasets and fine-tuned models.
Project Objectives
Students will develop a LangChain-based application that incorporates:
Document processing and retrieval systems
Custom chain implementations
Memory management for conversational AI
Integration with fine-tuned or pre-trained models
Evaluation and testing frameworks
Recommended Project Ideas (Choose One)
1. Intelligent Document Q&A System
Build a system that can answer questions about uploaded documents using retrieval-
augmented generation (RAG).
2. Code Documentation Assistant
Create an assistant that helps explain, document, and improve code snippets across multiple
programming languages.
3. Educational Content Summarizer
Develop a tool that processes academic papers or textbooks and generates structured
summaries with key insights.
4. Customer Support Chatbot
Build a conversational agent that can handle customer queries using company-specific
knowledge bases.
Available Open Source Datasets
Text and Document Datasets
Common Crawl: Web-scraped text data (large-scale)
WikiText-103: High-quality Wikipedia articles
OpenWebText: Reddit submissions dataset
BookCorpus: Collection of over 11,000 books
MS MARCO: Microsoft's question-answering dataset
SQuAD 2.0: Stanford Question Answering Dataset
Domain-Specific Datasets
arXiv Dataset: Scientific papers and abstracts
PubMed: Biomedical literature database
Legal Text Corpus: Court cases and legal documents
StackOverflow: Programming Q&A dataset
NewsQA: News article question-answering pairs
Conversational Datasets
PersonaChat: Personality-based conversations
MultiWOZ: Multi-domain task-oriented dialogues
Empathetic Dialogues: Emotion-aware conversations
ConvAI2: Conversational AI challenge dataset
Code Datasets
CodeSearchNet: Code documentation pairs
The Stack: Large collection of source code
GitHub Code: Repository-based code samples
HumanEval: Python programming problems
Recommended LLM Models for Fine-tuning
Lightweight Models (Suitable for Student Hardware)
** distilBERT**: Efficient transformer for text understanding
T5-small/base: Text-to-text generation capabilities
GPT-2: Generative model for text completion
FLAN-T5: Instruction-tuned variant of T5
CodeT5: Specialized for code-related tasks
Medium-Scale Models (Require Better Hardware)
LLaMA 7B: Meta's efficient language model
Mistral 7B: High-performance open-source model
CodeLlama 7B: Code-specialized version of LLaMA
Vicuna 7B: Instruction-following model
MPT-7B: MosaicML's commercially usable model
Pre-trained Models (No Fine-tuning Required)
OpenAI GPT Models (via API)
Anthropic Claude (via API)
Hugging Face Transformers: Various pre-trained models
Google PaLM (via API)
Cohere Models (via API)
5-Day Implementation Timeline
Day 1: Setup and Planning
Environment setup (Python, LangChain, dependencies)
Dataset selection and initial exploration
Model selection based on hardware constraints
Architecture design and component planning
Day 2: Data Preparation
Dataset preprocessing and cleaning
Text chunking and embedding generation
Vector database setup (Chroma, FAISS, or Pinecone)
Data validation and quality checks
Day 3: Model Integration
Model loading and configuration
Fine-tuning setup (if applicable)
LangChain chain construction
Memory system implementation
Day 4: Application Development
Core functionality implementation
User interface development (Streamlit/Gradio)
Chain orchestration and workflow design
Error handling and edge cases
Day 5: Testing and Evaluation
Unit testing and integration testing
Performance evaluation metrics
User acceptance testing
Documentation and presentation preparation
Technical Requirements
Essential Libraries
langchain
transformers
torch/tensorflow
huggingface-hub
chromadb or faiss-cpu
streamlit or gradio
pandas
numpy
Hardware Recommendations
Minimum: 8GB RAM, 4GB GPU memory
Recommended: 16GB RAM, 8GB GPU memory
Cloud Alternative: Google Colab Pro, AWS EC2, or Azure ML
Key Implementation Considerations
Do's
Start with pre-trained models before attempting fine-tuning
Use efficient embedding models (sentence-transformers)
Implement proper error handling and logging
Design modular, reusable components
Test with small datasets first
Document your code and decisions
Don'ts
Don't attempt to train models from scratch
Avoid overly complex architectures initially
Don't ignore data preprocessing quality
Don't skip evaluation and testing phases
Avoid hardcoding configurations
Don't neglect memory management for large datasets
Evaluation Metrics
Performance Metrics
Response accuracy and relevance
Query processing time
Memory usage efficiency
Token consumption (for API-based models)
Quality Metrics
Answer coherence and factuality
Source attribution accuracy
Conversation flow naturalness
Error handling effectiveness
Deliverables
1. Functional Application: Working LangChain implementation
2. Technical Documentation: Architecture, setup, and usage guides
3. Evaluation Report: Performance analysis and metrics
4. Demonstration: Live demo or recorded presentation
5. Source Code: Well-documented, version-controlled repository
Success Criteria
Application successfully handles user queries
Demonstrates at least 3 LangChain components
Shows measurable improvement over baseline approaches
Includes proper error handling and user feedback
Documentation enables project replication
Additional Resources
Learning Materials
LangChain official documentation
Hugging Face Transformers tutorials
Vector database comparison guides
Fine-tuning best practices documentation
Community Support
LangChain Discord community
Hugging Face forums
Stack Overflow for technical issues
GitHub repositories with similar implementations
Troubleshooting Common Issues
Memory Problems
Use gradient checkpointing for training
Implement batch processing for large datasets
Consider model quantization techniques
Performance Issues
Profile code to identify bottlenecks
Use caching for repeated operations
Optimize embedding and retrieval processes
Model Integration Challenges
Verify model compatibility with LangChain
Check tokenizer configurations
Ensure proper input/output formatting
Final Notes
This project emphasizes practical implementation over theoretical complexity. Focus on
building a working system that demonstrates LangChain's capabilities while providing real
value to end users. The 5-day timeline requires disciplined scope management and iterative
development approach.
Remember that the goal is learning and demonstration, not production-ready deployment.
Prioritize functionality, documentation, and understanding over optimization and scalability
for this academic exercise.
