How to save & continue GroupChat

[amw5g]

For a given autogen.GroupChat, is there a preferred way to save the chat and then recover/continue at a later date?

As an example, we might have a GroupChat made up of a userproxy + researcher + analyst + critic. We give the group a task to research a Company, develop an analysis, and improve it via feedback from the critic. We then use the UserProxyAgent to let a human ask refining questions. The task completes and terminates.

At a later date, we might want to ask follow-up questions. It feels inefficient to start the GroupChat up all over again. So how might we shortcut the continuation?

[ekzhu]

GroupChat supports messages in the constructor. So you can restart a previous group chat session by inject the chat history, which is also available in the messages attribute.

[WebsheetPlugin]

I did like you said, it required a recipient. I have set user_proxy.
Still, I am not seeing any of the messages in the request.

here is what I have:
self.messages = [{'content': 'what can you do?', 'role': 'user', 'name': 'USER'}, {'content': 'I can do the following tasks...', 'role': 'assistant', 'name': 'USER'}, {'role': 'user', 'content': 'what does 3?', 'name': 'USER'}]

self.groupchat = autogen.GroupChat(
agents=self.BODY["agents"],
messages=self.messages,
max_round=12,
speaker_selection_method=self.custom_speaker_selection_func,
)
self.manager = autogen.GroupChatManager(groupchat=self.groupchat)
self.manager.initiate_chat(self.user_proxy)

and still, in request, it misses all of those above. Do the messages need to follow some structure? Do I need to initiate_chat with some specific user or other settings?

[WebsheetPlugin]

Omg, I found it. It was because of clear_history which for whatever reason is set True by default. now I see the messages.

But thank you! You have put me in the right direction.

[WebsheetPlugin]

Argh, ok sorry, I was wrong, it did not solve the issue. So I am still lost as to why the messages are not showing.

[ekzhu]

Change

self.manager.initiate_chat(self.user_proxy)

to

self.user_proxy.initiate_chat(self.manager)

[ekzhu]

Also the role in the messages is important. Try run a group chat without existing messages and see what role get set.

[joshkyh]

I don't want simply to get a chat history, but recreate the group chat as if it had never ended.

From the graph perspective only, you'd need to serialize GroupChat.allowed_speaker_transitions_dict, and pass it back in the GroupChat constructor parameters allowed_or_disallowed_speaker_transitions = exported_GroupChat.allowed_speaker_transitions_dict and speaker_transitions_type = "allowed".

I'm preempting/guessing depending on whether you'd be exporting as native Python binaries to your storage, you might encounter some challenges in exporting GroupChat.allowed_speaker_transitions_dict as both its keys and values are of type Agent not String.

We can create a built-in method to resume a group chat from a previous message history.

I'd love resumable GroupChat to be a functionality, it has been a pain-point for commercial applications in my experience. cc @sonichi, @ekzhu :)

[ekzhu]

Add resumable groupchat issue #2359 and to our persistence roadmap: #2358