Skip to content

Model Configuration

ModelConfig

SyGra requires model configuration as the first step. It supports various clients like HTTP, MistralAzure, AsyncOpenAI, AsyncAzureOpenAI, Ollama to connect to inference servers (Text Generation Inference (TGI), vLLM server, Azure Cloud Service, Ollama, Triton etc.).

The config folder contains the main configuration file: models.yaml. You can add your model alias as a key and define its properties as shown below.

Note:
For Triton, the pre-processing and post-processing configuration (payload_json & response_key) can be defined in the payload_cfg.json file. payload_key in the payload_cfg.json file should be added to the models.yaml file for the corresponding Triton model. If the payload key is not defined in models.yaml, the default payload format will be used.

Environment Variables for Credentials and Chat Templates

All sensitive connection information such as model URL and tokens must be set via environment variables and not stored in the config file.

For each model defined in your models.yaml, set environment variables as follows: - SYGRA_<MODEL_NAME>_URL (for the model endpoint) - SYGRA_<MODEL_NAME>_TOKEN (for API keys or tokens) - If modify_tokenizer: true is set for a model, provide a chat template string via: - SYGRA_<MODEL_NAME>_CHAT_TEMPLATE

Naming Convention:
<MODEL_NAME> is the model’s key from your models.yaml, with all spaces replaced by underscores, and all letters uppercased (e.g., mixtral 8x7bMIXTRAL_8X7B).

Example:
For mixtral_8x7b and gpt4, set: - SYGRA_MIXTRAL_8X7B_URL, SYGRA_MIXTRAL_8X7B_TOKEN - SYGRA_GPT4_URL, SYGRA_GPT4_TOKEN - If mixtral_8x7b has modify_tokenizer: true, set:
- SYGRA_MIXTRAL_8X7B_CHAT_TEMPLATE to your custom Jinja2 chat template string

You should use a .env file at the project root or set these in your shell environment.

Note: If you want to define a list of URLs for any model, you can use pipe (|) as a separator. For example, if you have a model called mixtral_8x7b with URLs https://myserver/models/mixtral-8x7b and https://myserver/models/mixtral-8x7b-2, you can set the following environment variables as shown in examples below.

Example .env:

SYGRA_MIXTRAL_8X7B_URL=https://myserver/models/mixtral-8x7b|https://myserver/models/mixtral-8x7b-2
SYGRA_MIXTRAL_8X7B_TOKEN=sk-abc123
SYGRA_MIXTRAL_8X7B_CHAT_TEMPLATE={% for m in messages %} ... {% endfor %}

Configuration Properties

Key Description
model_type Type of backend server (tgi, vllm, openai, azure_openai, azure, mistralai, ollama, triton)
model_name Model name for your deployments (for Azure/Azure OpenAI)
api_version API version for Azure or Azure OpenAI
hf_chat_template_model_id Hugging Face model ID
completions_api (Optional) Boolean: use completions API instead of chat completions API (default: false)
modify_tokenizer (Optional) Boolean: apply custom chat template and modify the base model tokenizer (default: false)
special_tokens (Optional) List of special stop tokens used in generation
post_process (Optional) Post processor after model inference (e.g. models.model_postprocessor.RemoveThinkData)
parameters (Optional) Generation parameters (see below)
chat_template_params (Optional) Chat template parameters (e.g. reasoning_effort for gpt-oss-120b)
when completions_api is enabled
ssl_verify (Optional) Verify SSL certificate (default: true)
ssl_cert (Optional) Path to SSL certificate file

Note

  • Do not include url, auth_token, or api_key in your YAML config. These are sourced from environment variables as described above.
  • If you want to set ssl_verify to false globally, you can set ssl_verify:false under model_config section in config/configuration.yaml

Customizable Model Parameters

  • temperature: Sampling randomness (0.0–2.0; lower is more deterministic)
  • top_p: Nucleus sampling (0.0–1.0)
  • max_tokens / max_new_tokens: Maximum number of tokens to generate
  • stop: List of stop strings to end generation
  • repetition_penalty: Penalizes repeated tokens (1.0 = no penalty)
  • presence_penalty: (OpenAI only) Encourages novel tokens
  • frequency_penalty: (OpenAI only) Penalizes frequently occurring tokens

The model alias set as a key in the configuration is referenced in your graph YAML files (for node types such as llm or multi_llm). You can override these model parameters, chat_template_params in the graph YAML for specific scenarios.


Understanding openai vs azure_openai vs azure Model Types

SyGra supports multiple ways of connecting to OpenAI and OpenAI-compatible models. The following clarifies the difference between openai, azure_openai, and azure model types:

Model Type Description Typical Use Case Required Config Keys
openai Connects directly to the public OpenAI API (https://api.openai.com/v1). Use this for hosted OpenAI models like gpt-4o, gpt-3.5-turbo, etc. model_type: openai
azure_openai Connects to OpenAI models hosted on Azure (Azure Cognitive Services → OpenAI deployment). Requires model_name and api_version. Use when your organization deploys OpenAI models via Azure. model_type: azure_openai, model_name, api_version
azure Generic HTTP client wrapper for non-OpenAI Azure models (e.g., Anthropic Claude, Mistral, Custom inference endpoints) using Azure API Gateway / Managed Endpoints. Use when Azure acts simply as a proxy HTTP endpoint to another model. model_type: azure, plus any extra headers in .env and models.yaml

Environment Variables

Client Required Environment Variables
openai SYGRA_<MODEL>_URL=https://api.openai.com/v1
SYGRA_<MODEL>_TOKEN=sk-...
azure_openai SYGRA_<MODEL>_URL=https://<resource>.openai.azure.com
SYGRA_<MODEL>_TOKEN=<azure-key>
azure SYGRA_<MODEL>_URL=https://<your-azure-endpoint>
SYGRA_<MODEL>_TOKEN=<auth-if-required>

Example Configuration (models.yaml)

gpt4_openai:
  model_type: openai
  parameters:
    temperature: 0.7
    max_tokens: 512

gpt4_azure:
  model_type: azure_openai
  model_name: gpt-4-32k
  api_version: 2024-05-01-preview
  parameters:
    temperature: 0.7
    max_tokens: 512

llama_3_1_405b_instruct:
  model_type: azure
  load_balancing: round_robin
  parameters:
    max_tokens: 4096
    temperature: 0.8
  hf_chat_template_model_id: meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct

qwen_2.5_32b_vl:
  model_type: vllm
  completions_api: true
  hf_chat_template_model_id: Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-32B-Instruct
  parameters:
    temperature: 0.15
    max_tokens: 10000
    stop: ["<|endoftext|>", "<|im_end|>", "<|eod_id|>"]

qwen3_1.7b:
  hf_chat_template_model_id: Qwen/Qwen3-1.7B
  post_process: sygra.core.models.model_postprocessor.RemoveThinkData
  model_type: ollama
  parameters:
    max_tokens: 2048
    temperature: 0.8

qwen3-32b-triton:
  hf_chat_template_model_id: Qwen/Qwen3-32B
  post_process: sygra.core.models.model_postprocessor.RemoveThinkData
  model_type: triton
  payload_key: default 
  # Uses default payload format defined in config/payload_cfg.json.
  # Add/Update the payload_cfg.json if you need to use a different payload format with new key.
  parameters:
    temperature: 0.7

Important: If you set modify_tokenizer: true for a model, you must provide the corresponding chat template in your environment as SYGRA__CHAT_TEMPLATE. Otherwise, exception will be raised during the model initialization.