Getting Started with Retrieve-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Chapter 1: Introduction to Retrieve-Augmented Generation
Limitations of Standard Large Language Models
What is Retrieve-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
The Core Architecture of a RAG System
RAG vs. Fine-tuning: Understanding the Differences
Benefits of Using RAG
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: The Retrieval Component
Role of the Retriever in RAG
Introduction to Vector Embeddings
Common Embedding Models
Similarity Search: Finding Relevant Vectors
Introduction to Vector Databases
Choosing a Vector Database: Considerations
Practice: Generating Text Embeddings
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Preparing Data for Retrieval
Loading Documents from Various Sources
The Need for Document Chunking
Fixed-Size Chunking Strategies
Content-Aware Chunking Approaches
Metadata Association with Chunks
Storing Processed Data in a Vector Database
Hands-on Practical: Chunking Documents
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: The Generation Component and Augmentation
Role of the Generator (LLM) in RAG
Structuring Prompts for RAG
Context Injection Methods
Managing Context Length Limitations
Generating the Final Response
Attributing Sources in Generated Output
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Building a Basic RAG Pipeline
Overview of RAG Frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex)
Setting up the Environment
Implementing the Retriever
Implementing the Generator Integration
Combining Retrieval and Generation
Running Queries Through the Pipeline
Hands-on Practical: End-to-End RAG System
Quiz for Chapter 5
Chapter 6: Evaluating and Improving RAG Systems
Challenges in Evaluating RAG
Component-Level Evaluation: Retrieval
Component-Level Evaluation: Generation
End-to-End RAG Evaluation Frameworks
Common Failure Modes
Basic Strategies for Improvement
Practice: Analyzing RAG Output Quality
Quiz for Chapter 6
Introduction to Vector Embeddings
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- Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space, Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean, 2013 arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1301.3781 - Introduces Word2Vec, a foundational method for learning dense word embeddings that capture semantic and syntactic relationships, illustrating the core idea of mapping words to vectors in a continuous space.
- Attention Is All You Need, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, 2017 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, Vol. 30 (Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, Inc. (NeurIPS)) DOI: 10.5555/3295222.3295349 - Presents the Transformer architecture, which has become a basis for many modern embedding models, allowing for the learning of contextual text representations.
- BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding, Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, 2019 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics) DOI: 10.18653/v1/N19-1423 - Introduces BERT, a significant advancement in pre-trained language models based on Transformers, important for generating context-aware embeddings.
- Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks, Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, 2019 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Association for Computational Linguistics) DOI: 10.18653/v1/D19-1410 - Describes Sentence-BERT, a method for creating semantically meaningful sentence and document embeddings from pre-trained BERT-like models, optimized for tasks like semantic similarity search.