Mastering RAG
RAG Developer Stack
1. Large Language Models (LLMs)
RAG uses pre-trained LLMs for text generation.
Selecting the right model depends on latency, cost,
and accuracy requirements.
Popular LLMs for RAG:
OpenAI GPT-4.5 / GPT-4o (via API)
Mistral / Mixtral
Meta LLaMA 3.3 / 3.2
Anthropic Claude 3.7
Google Gemini 2.0
Falcon / Bloom / Pythia
Command R+ (Cohere)
💡 Tip: Choose open-source LLMs for privacy &
on-premise deployment.
2. Retrieval Mechanisms
Retrieval is a crucial step in RAG, responsible for
fetching relevant information before passing it to the
LLM.
Types of Retrieval:
Dense Retrieval
Uses neural embeddings to find semantically
relevant documents.
Example: Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR), ColBERT,
Contriever
Sparse Retrieval (BM25 / TF-IDF)
Traditional search method based on term frequency
& relevance scoring.
Hybrid Retrieval (Dense + Sparse)
Combines BM25 & Vector Search for better
recall & precision.
Retrieval Frameworks:
FAISS (Facebook AI Similarity Search)
ChromaDB (lightweight & fast)
Weaviate (open-source & scalable)
Pinecone (fully managed vector DB)
Qdrant (AI-native vector database and a semantic
search engine)
Milvus (high-speed retrieval)
3.Vector Embeddings
Documents & queries are converted into high-
dimensional vectors before retrieval.
Popular Embedding Models:
OpenAI’s text-embedding-3-large
Hugging Face Sentence Transformers
(e.g., BERT, MiniLM) Cohere Embed Models
BAAI’s BGE Embeddings
💡 Tip: Choose open-source LLMs for privacy &
on-premise deployment.
4.Chunking & Indexing
To improve retrieval efficiency, documents must be
chunked & indexed effectively.
Chunking Strategies:
Fixed-Length Chunks (e.g., 512 or 1024 tokens)
Recursive Character Splitting (based on paragraph
boundaries)
Sliding Window (overlapping chunks for better
context)
Indexing Frameworks:
LlamaIndex (Formerly GPT Index)
Haystack (deepset AI)
LangChain Document Loaders & Splitters
5. Re-Ranking
Re-ranking improves retrieval results by scoring and
ordering retrieved documents before feeding them to
the LLM.
Re-Ranking Models:
ncoders (e.g., MS-MARCO, Cohere Reranker)
ColBERT (Late Interaction Ranking)
bge-m3
mxbai-embed-large-v1
Hybrid Rankers (BM25 + Neural Re-rankers)
6. Orchestration & Frameworks
To simplify RAG workflows, frameworks help in
retrieval, embedding, and response generation.
Best RAG Frameworks:
LangChain (Modular, widely used)
LlamaIndex (Efficient document indexing & retrieval)
Haystack (Scalable, for production RAG apps)
FastRAG (Lightweight & optimized)
7. Query Processing & Prompt
Engineering
The quality of the retrieval query directly affects RAG
output.
Techniques for Query Optimization:
Query Expansion (Add synonyms & related terms)
Rewriting Queries (Using LLMs to generate better
search queries)
Contextualization (Retain user history for relevance)
Prompt Engineering Methods:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) (For reasoning-heavy
tasks)
Retrieval-Augmented Prompts (Dynamically
inserting context)
Few-Shot Learning (Providing examples for better
outputs)
8. Caching for Speed Optimization
Since retrieval & generation can be computationally
expensive, caching is used to speed up responses.
Caching Strategies:
Semantic Caching (Store past queries & responses)
Vector Index Caching (Avoid redundant retrieval)
LLM API Response Caching (Reduce token cost)
Tools for Caching:
Redis (for fast in-memory caching)
LlamaIndex Hybrid Cache
Local Disk-Based Caching (via SQLite, Pickle)
9. Evaluation & Metrics
Measuring RAG system performance ensures accuracy
& efficiency.
Key Evaluation Metrics:
Retrieval Precision & Recall (Relevance of retrieved
documents)
Hallucination Rate (False information in generated
responses)
Latency (Time taken for retrieval + generation)
Token Efficiency (Cost-effective context usage)
Evaluation Frameworks:
EVALRAG (by Hugging Face)
DeepEval
Arize AI Phoenix
LlamaIndex Evaluator
OpenAI's EvalGPT
Retrieval-Augmented Benchmarking Tools
(RAGAS)
10. Deployment & Scalability
RAG applications need to be scalable & optimized for
production use.
Deployment Options:
Cloud-Based (AWS, GCP, Azure)
On-Premises (Using Hugging Face Models + FAISS)
Hybrid (Edge + Cloud for latency optimization)
Scaling Strategies:
Batch Processing (Pre-compute embeddings)
Asynchronous Retrieval (Parallel requests for
speed-up)
Model Distillation (Use smaller LLMs for cost-
efficiency)
