Tag: rag
All the articles with the tag "rag".
Building RAG: Chunking, HyDE and Caching
Updated:Most RAG failures happen before generation: the chunk that holds the answer is never retrieved. Eight ways to cut this blog into chunks, plus a control, measured on 150 questions by whether the answer's sentence comes back; HyDE, measured; an embedding cache keyed by model and text; a semantic cache's hits and wrong answers at six thresholds; and when RAG is the wrong tool.
The Notebook Assistant, End to End
Updated:The series' running example, built as one working system: a question-answering assistant for this blog, with a semantic cache, hybrid retrieval, a cross-encoder reranker, a prompt that fences retrieved text as data, a 3B model that cites its passages, and a citation check. One question traced through every stage; a scorecard on 150 questions, 15 the blog doesn't answer, 30 repeats and a planted injection, with the judge checked by hand; the cost per answer, refining the series map's estimate; and what to change next.
Beyond Vector RAG: Agentic, Graph and Vectorless Retrieval
Updated:When one retrieval pass can't answer the question, there are three ways to go further: let the model decide what to fetch next (agentic RAG), fetch structure instead of chunks (GraphRAG), or navigate a document's own outline instead of embedding it (vectorless retrieval). How each works and what it costs, with GraphRAG's indexing bill computed for this blog, and keyword, dense, hybrid and LLM-navigated retrieval compared on 30 questions about it.