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RAG Syllabus R&D

This document outlines a syllabus for learning about retrieval augmented generation. It covers foundations of RAG including LLMs, components of RAG systems, basic RAG pipelines, advanced techniques like improved retrieval methods and query processing, evaluating and fine-tuning RAG systems, and applications such as multi-modal RAG and distributed architectures.

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pravin2275767
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144 views6 pages

RAG Syllabus R&D

This document outlines a syllabus for learning about retrieval augmented generation. It covers foundations of RAG including LLMs, components of RAG systems, basic RAG pipelines, advanced techniques like improved retrieval methods and query processing, evaluating and fine-tuning RAG systems, and applications such as multi-modal RAG and distributed architectures.

Uploaded by

pravin2275767
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Retrieval Augmented Generation (Syllabus)

Chapter 1: Foundations of Retrieval Augmented Generation

1. Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)


- Overview of natural language processing
- Transformer architecture and attention mechanisms
- Pre-training and fine-tuning concepts

Hands-on: Explore a pre-trained LLM using Hugging Face Transformers library


Exercise: Implement a simple text generation task using a pre-trained model

2. Understanding Retrieval Augmented Generation


- Limitations of traditional LLMs
- Concept of external knowledge integration
- RAG architecture overview
- Comparison with other knowledge-enhanced LLM approaches

Hands-on: Analyze differences between standard LLM outputs and RAG


outputs
Exercise: Gather information on potential applications of RAG in various
industries

3. Components of RAG Systems


- Document stores and vector databases
- Embedding models and semantic search
- Query processing and reformulation
- Retriever-Reader architecture

Hands-on: Set up a simple vector database using FAISS or Pinecone


Exercise: Implement basic semantic search using sentence transformers

4. Basic RAG Pipeline


- Data preprocessing and chunking
- Indexing and storage
- Retrieval process
- Generation with context

Hands-on: Build a basic RAG pipeline using langchain or llama_index


Exercise: Create a simple question-answering system using RAG

Chapter 2: Advanced RAG Techniques and Optimizations

1. Improved Retrieval Methods


- Dense passage retrieval
- Hybrid search (combining sparse and dense retrievals)
- Re-ranking techniques
- Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search

Hands-on: Implement dense passage retrieval using DPR models


Exercise: Develop a hybrid search system and compare its performance with
basic retrieval

2. Query Processing Enhancements


- Query expansion and reformulation
- Query decomposition for complex questions
- Conversational context management
- Multi-hop reasoning in RAG

Hands-on: Implement query expansion using synonyms and related terms


Exercise: Build a system that can handle multi-turn conversations using RAG

3. Advanced Indexing and Chunking Strategies

- Sliding window approaches


- Hierarchical chunking
- Metadata-aware indexing
- Dynamic document updating

Hands-on: Experiment with different chunking strategies on a diverse dataset


Exercise: Develop an indexing system that preserves document structure and
metadata

4. Prompt Engineering for RAG


- Designing effective prompts for retrieval
- Context integration techniques
- Handling multiple retrieved passages
- Few-shot prompting in RAG

Hands-on: Experiment with various prompt structures for RAG


Exercise: Optimize a RAG system's performance through prompt engineering
Chapter 3: Evaluating, Fine-tuning, and Optimizing RAG
Systems

1. Evaluation Metrics for RAG

- Relevance and coherence metrics


- Factual consistency and hallucination detection
- Task-specific evaluation frameworks
- Human evaluation protocols

Hands-on: Implement ROUGE and BERTScore for RAG output evaluation


Exercise: Develop a custom evaluation pipeline for a specific RAG application

2. Fine-tuning Strategies for RAG


- Retriever fine-tuning techniques
- Generator fine-tuning for context integration
- End-to-end fine-tuning approaches
- Domain adaptation methods

Hands-on: Fine-tune a retriever model on a domain-specific dataset


Exercise: Implement and compare different fine-tuning strategies for a RAG
system

3. Handling Edge Cases and Failures

- Strategies for no relevant information scenarios


- Confidence estimation and fallback mechanisms
- Dealing with contradictory information
- Out-of-distribution query handling
Hands-on: Implement a confidence estimation module for RAG outputs
Exercise: Develop a RAG system that gracefully handles various edge cases

4. Performance Optimization

- Caching strategies
- Model quantization and pruning
- Batching and parallelization techniques
- Hardware acceleration for RAG systems

Hands-on: Implement a caching layer for frequently accessed documents


Exercise: Optimize a RAG system for low-latency responses

Chapter 4: Advanced Applications, Architectures, and Future


Directions

1. Multi-modal RAG Systems

- Incorporating image and video data


- Audio-based retrieval and generation
- Cross-modal retrieval techniques

Hands-on: Extend a RAG system to handle image-text queries


Exercise: Develop a multi-modal RAG application (e.g., visual question
answering)

2. Distributed and Scalable RAG Architectures


- Sharding and distributed indexing
- Load balancing strategies
- Real-time updating of knowledge bases
- Cloud-based RAG deployments

Hands-on: Set up a distributed RAG system using multiple servers


Exercise: Design and implement a scalable RAG architecture for high-
throughput scenarios

3. Ethical Considerations and Bias Mitigation


- Identifying and addressing biases in retrieval and generation
- Ensuring source credibility and diversity
- Privacy-preserving RAG techniques
- Explainable AI in RAG systems

Hands-on: Analyze a RAG system for potential biases


Exercise: Implement bias mitigation strategies in a RAG pipeline

4. Emerging Trends and Research Directions

- Few-shot and zero-shot learning in RAG


- Self-improving RAG systems
- Integration with other AI technologies (e.g., reinforcement learning, causal
inference)
- RAG for code generation and analysis

Hands-on: Experiment with few-shot learning techniques in RAG.

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