LLM Request Intercept Outcomes

An LLM request intercept rewrites a request before managed execution. This page describes the canonical outcome returned by each intercept, including how Relay uses it to resolve the provider request and schedule lifecycle marks.

A canonical outcome serialization looks like this:

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{
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  "request": {"headers": {}, "content": {}},
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  "annotated_request": null,
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  "pending_marks": []
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}

request is required. annotated_request defaults to null when omitted on input, and pending_marks defaults to an empty list. Canonical serialization includes all three fields. A pending mark only contains name, optional category and category_profile, and optional data, data_schema, metadata, and typed log severity. Relay owns event UUIDs, parent UUIDs, and timestamps.

Request Authority

The provider-body source of truth only depends on whether a request codec is active:

Request codecs translate provider-specific request payloads into Relay’s normalized annotated request for intercepts, then encode accepted annotated edits back into the provider request before execution. They normalize the payload shape rather than translating between providers; response codecs are a separate response-side path used to attach normalized data to lifecycle events.

With an active codec, request.content is read-only context. Every intercept must return an annotation and make provider-body changes through that annotation. Use portable fields such as messages and instructions, the tagged api_specific surface for modeled provider controls, provider-native components for provider-only unions, and flattened extra only for unknown future top-level fields. Relay rejects a changed raw body or missing annotation at the offending intercept before invoking later middleware or creating an LLM lifecycle.

The nemo-relay gateway enables request codecs for the generation routes /v1/messages, /v1/chat/completions, and /v1/responses, including streaming requests. Interceptors written for those routes must migrate provider-body mutation from request.content to annotated_request. Count-token, model, probe, and non-LLM passthrough routes retain raw-body authority.

For gateway generation routes, preserve the effective stream mode in the annotation. Relay rejects buffered-to-streaming and streaming-to-buffered edits before the provider callback because response handling is selected from the original request.

The following diagram shows how Relay resolves an intercept outcome before managed execution.

Binding Contract

The following callbacks return the same logical outcome in their native type or object shape:

The standalone request-intercept helper returns the complete outcome but does not emit its pending marks because it does not own an LLM lifecycle.

Managed Lifecycle

Managed execution runs all effective global and scope-local intercepts before creating the LLM handle. Each accepted request and annotation pair feeds the next intercept under the authority rules above, while pending marks append in middleware order. A breaking intercept retains the marks it returned. If any intercept fails or its boundary result is malformed, Relay discards all accumulated marks and creates no LLM lifecycle.

After successful interception, Relay creates the handle and captures one subscriber snapshot. It emits the LLM start at T, every pending mark at T + 1µs in returned order with the LLM UUID as parent, and the LLM end no earlier than T + 1µs. Streaming and non-streaming calls use the same rules. Pending marks are never added to the provider request, annotated request, codec input, sanitizer input, or start payload.

Historical 0.6 Migration

This section describes the NeMo Relay 0.6 migration. Relay 0.8 retains the grpc-v1 identifier but replaces the tool-result envelope fields with structured protobuf messages. Rebuild workers, regenerate custom protobuf bindings, and exclude pre-0.8 Relay versions in compat.relay.

This finalizes unpublished native ABI v2 and grpc-v1 contracts. Rebuild all development native plugins and workers against the same NeMo Relay release that hosts them. Replace tuple results, split outputs, metadata envelopes, and parallel mark-aware registrations with the canonical outcome and the existing register_llm_request_intercept registration name.

The 0.6 annotation expansion changes the request and outcome envelope schemas to nemo.relay.AnnotatedLlmRequest@2 and nemo.relay.LlmRequestInterceptOutcome@2. Rebuild Rust native plugins and Rust grpc-v1 workers against NeMo Relay 0.6, and update Python workers to the 0.6 worker SDK. That release required a compatibility range that excluded Relay 0.5. Relay 0.8 supersedes that historical floor for every dynamic plugin: after rebuilding, declare compat.relay = ">=0.8.0,<1.0", or another range that excludes Relay versions before 0.8. The host enforces the current compatibility floor during manifest and registry validation, before loading the plugin.

For gateway generation requests, replace code such as request.content["messages"] = ... with an edit to annotated_request.messages, then return both the unchanged raw request and the edited annotation. Header edits continue to use request.headers. An attempt to change the raw body while its request codec is active returns an explicit error before the provider callback.

Tool execution intercepts have a smaller result-and-marks contract, documented in Tool Execution Intercept Outcomes. Worker authors can trace both envelopes through the grpc-v1 protocol reference.