Daniel Nashed's Blog

Domino IQ -- Paraphrasing explained

Domino IQ 14.5 GA introduces a paraphrasing request invoked before the actual request (added post 14.5 EA3).
This additional request is intended to protect against ticking the LLM to perform other operations then intended by the system prompt.
The idea is to send a request to the same LLM to sanitize and refine the request.

The functionality is documented here -> https://help.hcl-software.com/domino/14.5.0/admin/conf_security_considerations_for_iq.html

The additional request adds overhead and depending on the LLM model it might introduce undesired results.
My personal recommendation is to disable this additional check, because most LLMs today already provide protection and also contain guard functionality for additional protection.

To disable the functionality add the following notes.ini

DOMIQ_DISABLE_PROMPT_PARAPHRASE=1

In my simple example, the meaning of the query slightly changed ("sense" vs "purpose").
I have seen other requests where a German question got translated to English, which causes the response to be returned in English in some cases.

The red part is the system prompt and prefix in front of the actual query.
The actual request uses the configured system prompt with the query returned by the LLM from the first request.


Paraphrasing request is send to the same LLM

{"model":"Qwen2.5","messages":[{"role":"system","content":"Paraphrase the following text:"},{"role":"user","content":"Paraphrase the following text:What is the sense of life?"}],"max_tokens":1024,"temperature":0.0}


Actual request

{"model":"Qwen2.5","messages":[{"role":"system","content":"You are a knowledgeable and helpful assistant. Provide clear and accurate answers to user questions in a concise and friendly manner."},{"role":"user","content":"What is the purpose of life?"}],"max_tokens":1024,"temperature":0.0}

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