Feature request

Currently tokenizer.apply_chat_template can be used to convert a chat in the form list of dicts into a formatted string for text generation. However, there is currently no convenient method for doing the reverse. A new function (hypothetically called tokenizer.parse_chat_template) could handle this.

See also:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79248499/how-to-reverse-the-tokenizer-apply-chat-template-method-and-handle-streaming-r
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79248486/how-to-reverse-the-tokenizer-apply-chat-template

Motivation

Logically if there is a function for converting a chat into a string, there should be a function that does the reverse, which would make things easier when working with AutoModelForCausalLM with chat models. This feature is already implemented in the pipeline API, so it should be straightforward to create a version that's exposed to end users.

Your contribution

N/A