MALTopic: Multi-Agent LLM Topic Modeling Library

MALTopic is a Python library designed for topic modeling using a coordinated multi-agent LLM framework. First framework to enhance the analysis of survey responses and open-ended text by integrating structured and categorical metadata with unstructured free-text responses.

The foundational research MALTopic paper.

Overview & Architecture

Traditional topic modeling approaches (such as LDA or BERTopic) analyze text in isolation and often miss demographic, behavioral, or categorical context. MALTopic decomposes topic extraction into agents working collaboratively:

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                          Raw Survey Data (CSV)                         │
│             [ Free-Text Column + Structured Metadata Columns ]          │
└───────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┘
                                    │
                                    ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        1. DATA ENRICHMENT AGENT                        │
│   Injects demographic/structured features into free text responses     │
│       without hallucinations or sentiment distortion. Generates:       │
│                     `{free_text_column}_enriched`                      │
└───────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┘
                                    │
                                    ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                         2. TOPIC MINING AGENT                          │
│   Extracts structured topics (name, description, relevance, keywords)   │
│   • Auto-batching via tiktoken token counting for large datasets       │
│   • Automatic fallback on context-window errors                        │
└───────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┘
                                    │
                                    ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                     3. TOPIC DEDUPLICATION AGENT                       │
│    Semantically reconciles & merges overlapping topics (>80% overlap)   │
│             into concise, comprehensive, non-redundant themes           │
└───────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┘
                                    │
                                    ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                             Final Outputs                              │
│   • Enriched DataFrame (CSV)       • Clean Topics JSON                 │
│   • Usage Statistics (Tokens, Latency, Calls, Cost Breakdown)          │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Installation

Install MALTopic via pip:

pip install maltopic

Or using poetry:

poetry add maltopic

Dependencies

MALTopic is built for Python 3.12+ and 3.13+ and depends on:

• openai>=1.79.0
• ollama>=0.6.0
• pandas>=2.2.3
• tiktoken>=0.9.0
• tqdm>=4.67.1
• streamlit>=1.28

Quickstart Tutorial

Here is a complete, copy-pasteable example analyzing customer survey feedback:

import os
import pandas as pd
from maltopic import MALTopic

# 1. Prepare sample survey data
df = pd.DataFrame({
    "customer_id": [101, 102, 103, 104],
    "plan_tier": ["Premium", "Basic", "Enterprise", "Basic"],
    "region": ["North America", "Europe", "North America", "Asia-Pacific"],
    "feedback": [
        "The checkout process is smooth, but I wish customer support answered faster on weekends.",
        "Mobile app crashes frequently whenever I attempt to upload receipt attachments.",
        "Enterprise API response times are fantastic, but billing documentation is confusing.",
        "Navigation is intuitive, but pages take too long to load on cellular data.",
    ]
})

# 2. Initialize MALTopic client
client = MALTopic(
    api_key=os.environ.get("OPENAI_API_KEY", "your-api-key"),
    default_model_name="gpt-4o-mini",
    llm_type="openai",
)

# 3. Step 1: Enrich free-text feedback with categorical metadata
enriched_df = client.enrich_free_text_with_structured_data(
    survey_context="Quarterly product feedback survey assessing customer satisfaction across subscription tiers.",
    free_text_column="feedback",
    structured_data_columns=["plan_tier", "region"],
    df=df,
    examples=[
        "Checkout is slow, Basic, Europe -> A Basic tier user in Europe experienced delays during checkout."
    ],
)

# 4. Step 2: Generate latent topics from enriched responses
topics = client.generate_topics(
    topic_mining_context="Identify core pain points, product feature requests, and service feedback.",
    df=enriched_df,
    enriched_column="feedback_enriched",
)

# 5. Step 3: Semantically deduplicate and consolidate similar topics
clean_topics = client.deduplicate_topics(
    topics=topics,
    survey_context="Customer feedback survey across multiple subscription tiers.",
)

# 6. Display results
for i, topic in enumerate(clean_topics, 1):
    print(f"\n[{i}] {topic['name']}")
    print(f"    Description: {topic['description']}")
    print(f"    Relevance:   {topic['relevance']}")
    print(f"    Keywords:    {', '.join(topic['representative_words'])}")

# 7. Print comprehensive token and latency telemetry
client.print_stats()

Using Ollama (local / self-hosted models)

To run the same pipeline against your own Ollama server, set llm_type="ollama" and point host at the server's IP address or URL. No API key is needed.

from maltopic import MALTopic

client = MALTopic(
    api_key="",                      # not used by Ollama
    default_model_name="llama3.1",   # any model pulled on the server (`ollama pull llama3.1`)
    llm_type="ollama",
    host="192.168.1.50",             # or "http://192.168.1.50:11434"; omit for localhost:11434
)

All pipeline methods (enrich_free_text_with_structured_data, generate_topics, deduplicate_topics) and stats tracking work unchanged.

Tip: Ollama's default context window is small, and it truncates long inputs silently instead of raising an error, so MALTopic's automatic batching fallback won't trigger. For topic generation on larger datasets, raise the context window with override_model_params={"options": {"num_ctx": 32768}}. When override_model_params is set, it replaces MALTopic's default sampling options, so include temperature and the like in options if you need them.

GUI (No-Code Web Interface)

MALTopic comes bundled with a modern, interactive web application built with Streamlit.

Launching the GUI

After installing maltopic, launch the GUI directly from your terminal:

maltopic-gui

Or via Python:

python -m maltopic.gui

6-Step Visual Pipeline Wizard

1. Step 1: Configure API
   Choose an LLM provider. For OpenAI, enter your API key and a model name (e.g. gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, o1-mini). For Ollama, enter your server's host/IP (e.g. 192.168.1.50) and a model pulled on it (e.g. gemma4:26b). You can also add optional custom parameter overrides. Your key is stored only in transient session memory.
2. Step 2: Upload Data
   Upload any CSV file (up to 200 MB), preview rows, and select the free-text column alongside one or more structured metadata columns.
3. Step 3: Enrich Text
   Define the survey context and optional few-shot examples. Watch the real-time progress bar as responses are contextualized. Download the enriched CSV at any time.
4. Step 4: Generate Topics
   Input topic mining guidance. Topics are extracted and displayed as responsive visual cards displaying topic titles, descriptions, target relevance groups, and representative keyword tags.
5. Step 5: Deduplicate Topics (Optional)
   Optionally run semantic deduplication to merge overlapping themes, with before-and-after comparison metrics.
6. Step 6: Results & Export
   Inspect the final topic cards, view the interactive usage statistics dashboard (total tokens, call counts, success rate, response times, model breakdown), and export:
   • Topics as JSON (maltopic_topics.json)
   • Enriched dataset as CSV (maltopic_enriched.csv)
   • Session telemetry as JSON (maltopic_stats.json)

Core Multi-Agent Pipeline

1. Data Enrichment Agent

Survey respondents frequently submit terse or ambiguous free-text (e.g., "Takes too long" or "Support was unhelpful"). The Data Enrichment Agent combines free-text with respondent metadata (demographics, subscription levels, satisfaction scores) to build a unified context string.

• Sentiment Preservation: The agent maintains the original sentiment and does not inject unsolicited assumptions or extrapolations.
• Output Column: Creates a new column named {free_text_column}_enriched in the returned DataFrame.
• Few-Shot Prompting: Supports optional domain-specific examples via the examples argument.

2. Topic Mining Agent & Automatic Batching

The Topic Mining Agent synthesizes responses to generate structured topic profiles adhering to four strict criteria:

• Uniqueness: Distinct concepts without redundant definitions.
• Exhaustiveness: Complete coverage of issues raised across all responses.
• Non-Overlapping: Clear boundaries between extracted themes.
• Respondent-Awareness: Explicitly highlights patterns across respondent segments.

Automatic Token Limit Batching

When dealing with thousands of survey responses, prompts can exceed the LLM's maximum context length. MALTopic handles this automatically:

1. Error Interception: Automatically catches token limit exceptions (maximum context length, context window, too many tokens).
2. Dynamic Splitting: Uses tiktoken to partition responses into optimal batches under token limits (default: 100k tokens per batch, with a 2,000-token instruction buffer).
3. Batch Processing: Displays a visual tqdm progress bar as each batch is processed independently.
4. Topic Consolidation: Merges and consolidates extracted topics into a unified set.

3. Semantic Topic Deduplication Agent

Traditional topic deduplication relies on exact keyword matching or string similarity (e.g., Levenshtein distance). MALTopic's Deduplication Agent performs semantic understanding:

• Detects topics with >80% conceptual overlap even if names use completely different words (e.g. "Slow App Performance" and "High Latency & Lag").
• Merges descriptions and relevance scopes to avoid losing subtle respondent nuances.
• Deduplicates and combines representative word lists.
• Preserves genuinely distinct topics unaltered.
• Fails gracefully: If deduplication encounters an API issue, it returns the original topics without interrupting your pipeline.

4. Telemetry & Statistics Tracking

Every call to MALTopic is monitored in real-time by an internal MALTopicStats instance.

Tracked Metrics

• Token Counts: Input/prompt tokens, output/completion tokens, and total tokens.
• Call Volume: Successful calls, failed calls, total calls made.
• Success Rate: Exact percentage of successful calls (0.0% to 100.0%).
• Latency & Throughput: Average response time per call and total session uptime.
• Per-Model Breakdowns: Token consumption and call statistics categorized per model.
• Recent Call History: Log of the last API calls with timestamps, latency, and status.

Estimating API Costs

You can use client.get_stats() to calculate exact API costs:

stats = client.get_stats()
overview = stats["overview"]

# Example: calculate cost for gpt-4o ($2.50 per 1M input tokens, $10.00 per 1M output tokens)
input_cost = (overview["total_input_tokens"] / 1_000_000) * 2.50
output_cost = (overview["total_output_tokens"] / 1_000_000) * 10.00
total_cost = input_cost + output_cost

print(f"Total API Cost: ${total_cost:.4f}")

Model Compatibility & Parameter Control

Standard Chat Models vs. Reasoning Models

OpenAI provides two distinct classes of chat completion models:

MALTopic includes automatic model detection:

• When calling standard models with override_model_params=None (the default), MALTopic automatically sets temperature=0.2, top_p=0.9, and seed=12345 for reproducibility.
• When calling reasoning models (o1, o3, gpt-5), MALTopic automatically omits these parameters to prevent API errors.

Custom Parameter Overrides

You can pass custom parameters via override_model_params during MALTopic initialization:

# Custom sampling configuration (completely replaces defaults)
client = MALTopic(
    api_key="your_api_key",
    default_model_name="gpt-4o",
    llm_type="openai",
    override_model_params={
        "temperature": 0.7,
        "max_tokens": 1000,
        "frequency_penalty": 0.2,
    }
)

To send only the bare minimum parameters (model, messages, store=False), pass an empty dictionary:

client = MALTopic(
    api_key="your_api_key",
    default_model_name="o1-mini",
    llm_type="openai",
    override_model_params={},
)

Complete Python API Reference

MALTopic Class

from maltopic import MALTopic

MALTopic(api_key, default_model_name, llm_type, override_model_params=None, host=None)

Initializes the MALTopic pipeline client.

• Parameters:
  • api_key (str): API credentials for authentication (ignored for "ollama"; pass "").
  • default_model_name (str): Model identifier (e.g., "gpt-4o", "o1-mini", "llama3.1").
  • llm_type (str): LLM provider, "openai" or "ollama".
  • override_model_params (dict[str, Any] | None, optional): Optional raw parameters dictionary to send to the provider API. Default: None (automatic parameter selection).
  • host (str | None, optional): Ollama server IP or URL (e.g. "192.168.1.50" or "http://192.168.1.50:11434"). Used only when llm_type="ollama". Default: None (the OLLAMA_HOST env var or localhost:11434).

enrich_free_text_with_structured_data(survey_context, free_text_column, structured_data_columns, df, examples=[]) -> pd.DataFrame

Enriches unstructured survey responses with structured column values.

• Parameters:
  • survey_context (str): Background description of the survey.
  • free_text_column (str): Column containing raw text responses.
  • structured_data_columns (list[str]): Column names containing structured metadata.
  • df (pd.DataFrame): Input Pandas DataFrame.
  • examples (list[str], optional): Few-shot examples illustrating the enrichment format.
• Returns: pd.DataFrame containing the original data plus {free_text_column}_enriched.

generate_topics(topic_mining_context, df, enriched_column) -> list[dict[str, Any]]

Extracts unique and non-overlapping topics from enriched text.

• Parameters:
  • topic_mining_context (str): Instructions describing desired topic focus.
  • df (pd.DataFrame): DataFrame containing enriched text.
  • enriched_column (str): Column name containing enriched responses.
• Returns: list[dict[str, Any]] where each dictionary has:
  • "name" (str): Topic name.
  • "description" (str): Explanation of the topic.
  • "relevance" (str): Target respondent profiles and patterns.
  • "representative_words" (list[str]): Representative NLP keywords.

deduplicate_topics(topics, survey_context) -> list[dict[str, Any]]

Semantically merges overlapping topics into unified themes.

• Parameters:
  • topics (list[dict[str, Any]]): List of topic dictionaries to deduplicate.
  • survey_context (str): Background context to guide merging decisions.
• Returns: list[dict[str, Any]] matching the topic schema.

get_stats() -> dict[str, Any]

Returns a dictionary containing session telemetry (overview, averages, model_breakdown, recent_calls).

print_stats() -> None

Prints formatted statistics directly to stdout.

reset_stats() -> None

Resets all tracked metrics to zero.

MALTopicStats Class

from maltopic import MALTopicStats

LLMCallStats Dataclass

from maltopic import LLMCallStats

Individual call record stored in stats.get_recent_calls():

• timestamp (float): Unix epoch timestamp.
• model_name (str): Model invoked.
• success (bool): Whether the call succeeded.
• input_tokens (int): Input tokens used.
• output_tokens (int): Output tokens generated.
• total_tokens (int): Total tokens consumed.
• response_time (float): Latency in seconds.
• error_message (str | None): Error string if failed.
• metadata (dict[str, Any]): Response metadata (e.g. finish_reason, system_fingerprint).

Utility Functions (maltopic.utils)

from maltopic import utils

• validate_dataframe(df: pd.DataFrame, required_columns: list[str]) -> None: Verifies non-empty DataFrame and presence of required columns.
• count_tokens(text: str, model_name: str = "gpt-4") -> int: Calculates exact tokens using tiktoken.
• split_text_into_batches(labeled_responses: list[str], max_tokens_per_batch: int = 100000, model_name: str = "gpt-4") -> list[list[str]]: Splits text into token-bounded batches.
• is_token_limit_error(error: Exception) -> bool: Identifies whether an exception is due to context window limits.
• validate_topic_structure(topics: list[dict[str, Any]]) -> None: Validates topic dictionary schema.
• parse_topics_response(raw_response: str) -> list[dict[str, Any]]: Parses and cleans LLM JSON response.
• consolidate_topics(all_topics: list[dict[str, Any]]) -> list[dict[str, Any]]: Fast deduplication by topic name.

Data Privacy & Local Execution

MALTopic is engineered with data privacy in mind:

• No Telemetry: MALTopic does not transmit telemetry, analytics, or usage data to third parties.
• Local Computing: All DataFrame manipulation, token counting, batching, and GUI rendering occur 100% locally on your machine.
• Provider Only: The only network requests made are directly between your machine and your chosen LLM provider (e.g., OpenAI) using your own API key.
• Fully Self-Hosted Option: With llm_type="ollama", requests go only to the Ollama server you specify, so your data never leaves your own infrastructure.
• Ephemeral Credentials: API keys entered into the web GUI are kept strictly in session memory and are never persisted to disk or logs.

Troubleshooting & Best Practices

Token Limit & Context Window Errors

• If your dataset is very large, MALTopic automatically detects context window exceedances and switches to batching.
• If you encounter rate limits (429 Too Many Requests), try setting max_tokens or choosing a tier-appropriate model (e.g. gpt-4o-mini).

Quality of Extracted Topics

• Provide detailed survey_context explaining why the survey was conducted and who the audience is.
• In topic_mining_context, specify the granularity desired (e.g. "Focus on actionable UX issues and billing complaints; avoid generic praise").

Reasoning Models (o1, o3, GPT-5)

• Do not pass temperature, top_p, or seed to reasoning models. Leave override_model_params=None and MALTopic will automatically filter them out for you.

Local Development & Testing

We welcome contributions to MALTopic! Follow these steps to set up your local development environment:

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/yash91sharma/MALTopic-py.git
cd MALTopic-py

2. Set up virtual environment

python3.13 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
pip install pytest mypy ruff

3. Run the test suite

pytest

4. Run type checking

mypy src tests

5. Run linter and formatting

ruff check src tests
ruff format --check src tests

Changelog

For detailed release history and migration notes, see CHANGELOG.md.

Contributing

Contributions are warmly welcomed! Please submit pull requests or file issues on GitHub.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for complete details.

Citation

If you use MALTopic in your academic research or applications, please cite our IEEE publication:

@inproceedings{sharma2025maltopic,
  author    = {Sharma, Yash},
  title     = {MALTopic: A Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Survey Analysis and Context-Aware Topic Modeling},
  booktitle = {2025 World AI-IoT Congress},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1109/WorldAI-IoT65487.2025.11105319},
  url       = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11105319}
}