Feat: Safe OWL Society Termination

[a7m-1st]

This Stop OWL feature enables users to terminate from long running Multi Turn processes safely. It does it by using present mechanisms to break the for loop. Current limitation is that it breaks the loop after a full turn, thus taking time if CoT in single Agent is involved, drilling Event to ChatbotAgent and society creation is required to achieve almost immediate termination. This PR closes #362 by @didier-durand

Screen.Recording.2025-04-01.025734.mp4

Added:

1. stop_owl function. It triggers the STOP_REQUESTED Thread Event
2. I passed this event to run_society() and added a check in the for loop.

answer, chat_history, token_info = run_society(
      society=society, 
      stop_event=STOP_REQUESTED
  )

Changed:

1. I had to move live_logs function to separate thread. This code was causing the Event queue to wait until the process_with_live_logs() was over, queueing thus invalidating stop_owl() events

def run_button_event():
.....
 while bg_thread.is_alive():
      # Update conversation record display
      logs2 = get_latest_logs(100, LOG_QUEUE)

      # Always update status
      yield (
          "0",
          "<span class='status-indicator status-running'></span> Processing...",
          logs2,
      )

      time.sleep(1)

2. After changing to async, asyncio threads doesn't support Generators (yield) while we need to send real-time data back to components. So, caused State management to change to Global or Session state.

Limitation of Current Approach:

1. The STOP_REQUESTED Event is getting triggered on time, but the condition check is getting delayed until a full loop is complete i.e. If Chain Of Thought (CoT) is getting processed by anyone of agents, then it won't terminate. Perhaps anyone can help Drilling the STOP_REQUESTED event deep inside Chat Agent or society creation.
2. A different issue is causing the feature not to be that useful. I have mentioned it in this issue 👉 Building Society Simulation Error when Rerunning #449

Notes on State Mgmt:

• This code uses Global State, thus making Web Page refreshes stateful. But will make it share state to other users if sharing is enabled:

app.launch(share=True)

• This can be solved easily solved by refactoring to Gradio's Session state (gr.State({})). But due to the nature of decoupled processing, run_owl() also needs to be stateless. This side effect will cause gradio to create a new state after refreshing the page while the deamon is running OWL

Just a note, I found Gradio Auto refresh was turned off intentionally, I think it was to simplify the code by using Generators instead of managing State but I am interested to know the reason (Not to break anything :D).
Currently all changes are stored to a global STATE then app updates components every second

app.load(update_interface, outputs=[token_count_output, status_output, log_display2, run_button, stop_button], every=1)

[didier-durand]

This will be really useful! Thanks

[Wendong-Fan]

thanks @a7m-1st ! After we stopped the running seems we can't run another task anymore, could we fix this?

[a7m-1st]

My pleasure @Wendong-Fan. About that one, I was facing the same issue previously too for some reason. I have pointed that out in issue #449 . But I will tend to it too.

[a7m-1st]

Screen.Recording.2025-05-02.144053.mp4

In video can see:

• Multiple Rerun is now possible ✅
• Browser instances are successfully closing ✅
• Token data successfully returning ✅

Updates since 81e2574

1. fix: Revert button state when clicked stop button
2. With the help of feat: terminate BrowserToolkit to allow rerun  camel#2194 attempts to partially fix issue Building Society Simulation Error when Rerunning #449
3. Termination is more atomic with the help of integrating the stop_event to ChatAgent in feat: add termination parameter to ChatAgent step and astep camel#2285

Limitation:

• For some reason, after closing browser instance in an unexpected way, it causes Building Society Simulation Error when Rerunning #449, it this case I didn't find solution yet except to restart the program