Retrieval Augmented

Generation
With Agents and Fine Tuning
 Project Presentation On
Retrieval Augmented Generation
Presented By

Adarsh Vishesh (2102221640003)

Aditya Shubham Jha (2102221640006)
Khemendra Kumar (2102221640029)
Riya Tripathi (2102221640044)
Shivam Singh (2102221640045)

Guided By : Mrs Rakhi Puri

Department of Computer Science & Engineering & AIML

ITS Engineering College , Greater Noida
Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
Table of contents
01 02 03

Introduction Background Problem Statement

04 05 06

Proposed Work System Design Implementation

07 08 09
Result Conclusion References
Introduction
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique
for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of generative
AI models with facts fetched from external sources.
In other words, it fills a gap in how LLMs work. Under
the hood, LLMs are neural networks, typically measured
by how many parameters they contain. An LLM’s
parameters essentially represent the general patterns
of how humans use words to form sentences.
That deep understanding, sometimes called
parameterized knowledge, makes LLMs useful in
responding to general prompts at light speed. However,
it does not serve users who want a deeper dive into a
current or more specific topic.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
is a cutting-edge framework that blends
the capabilities of large language models
(LLMs) with the precision of information
retrieval systems.

In scenarios like navigating large

collections of PDFs, RAG offers a
solution that surpasses traditional
methods of document search and
extraction.

By leveraging both pre-trained models

and retrieval mechanisms, RAG
enhances the model’s ability to generate
responses grounded in specific, accurate
information found within documents.
 Background
Information Retrieval Systems (IR)

● Early methods of retrieving relevant documents based on keyword matching, such as Boolean
search and TF-IDF, laid the groundwork for modern information retrieval systems.
● These approaches often struggled with understanding the context and semantics of queries,
resulting in inaccurate or incomplete retrieval.

Advancements in Language Models

● The development of large language models (LLMs) like GPT, BERT, and T5 revolutionized natural
language understanding (NLU). These models excel at generating coherent and contextually
relevant text but can suffer from "hallucinations" by generating inaccurate information when used
without grounding in external knowledge.
Background
Retrieval-Augmented Models

● The concept of augmenting generation models with retrieval was first explored to enhance the
factual accuracy of outputs. By combining a retrieval step with generative capabilities, models
can produce responses that are grounded in real-world documents.
● Early approaches include Fusion-in-Decoder and OpenQA, which combined retrieval and
generative models but lacked fine-grained control over the retrieval process.

Introduction of RAG by Facebook AI (2020)

● RAG was formally introduced as a hybrid model combining Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR)
with generative pre-trained models. This method retrieves relevant passages before generating
answers, improving both precision and context in responses.
● RAG was shown to outperform previous retrieval-based models, especially in open-domain
question-answering tasks.
Background
RAG in Question Answering (QA) Systems
● Research shows that RAG models are particularly useful in open-domain QA, providing the ability
to reference specific pieces of text in response generation.
● Unlike other models, RAG avoids common issues in QA systems such as irrelevant answers by
retrieving documents related to the question, thus improving accuracy and relevance.

Application to Domain-Specific Data (e.g., Legal, Healthcare, Financial)

● Recent studies indicate that RAG can be fine-tuned for specific industries by training it on
domain-specific documents. This leads to improved performance in tasks such as legal contract
analysis, clinical document retrieval, and financial reporting.
● The ability to extract precise information from unstructured data has proven valuable in regulated
sectors that require high accuracy.
Problem Statement
How can we design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model that effectively
combines information retrieval from large, unstructured document collections (e.g., PDFs)
with the natural language generation capabilities of pre-trained language models, ensuring
that the generated responses are accurate, contextually relevant, and scalable across
different domains?

Key sub-problems include:

1. Ensuring accurate and relevant retrieval from large, unstructured datasets.

2. Generating coherent, contextually appropriate, and factually grounded responses from the
retrieved data.
3. Adapting the model to domain-specific tasks and datasets to improve precision in
specialized fields.
4. Addressing scalability and computational efficiency when handling massive collections of
documents.
5. Reducing latency in real-time applications, such as customer service or interactive systems.
Proposed Work for the RAG Model Problem
Objective: The proposed work aims to design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation
(RAG) system that efficiently handles large, unstructured datasets (such as PDFs) and
generates accurate, context-aware responses. This system will be adaptable to
domain-specific tasks, ensuring both scalability and low latency for real-time
applications.

Components of the Proposed Work:

Data Preprocessing and Indexing:
● Extract relevant text from unstructured documents (e.g., PDFs) and preprocess the data
for effective retrieval (e.g., tokenization, vectorization).
● Build an optimized index for fast retrieval using algorithms like Dense Passage Retrieval
(DPR) or other transformer-based retrieval systems.
Document Retrieval System (Retriever):
● Use advanced retrieval techniques like DPR or BM25 to fetch relevant passages or documents in
response to a query.
● Implement a ranking mechanism to prioritize the most relevant documents, improving retrieval precision
and recall.
● Integrate external knowledge sources, if necessary, to enhance retrieval accuracy.

Generative Model (Generator):

● Utilize pre-trained language models like GPT-3 or T5 to generate natural language responses based on
the retrieved documents.
● Ensure that the generation is tightly grounded in the retrieved information to prevent hallucinations and
improve factual accuracy.

Domain-Specific Fine-Tuning:

● Fine-tune the RAG model on domain-specific datasets (e.g., legal, healthcare, finance) to adapt its
language generation and retrieval capabilities to specialized vocabularies and requirements.
● Use transfer learning to improve the model’s performance on niche tasks while minimizing the need for
large, domain-specific training datasets.
 User Query Large Unstructured
Real-Time Optimization: (Input) Datasets (PDFs,etc.)

● Implement caching and parallel

processing to reduce latency for real-time
applications like customer service. Document Retriever Preprocessed &
● Explore methods such as dynamic (e.g.,DPR,BM25,etc.) Indexed Data Store
retrieval (fetching only relevant portions in
real-time) to minimize computational
overhead and enhance responsiveness.
Top-K Relevant
Evaluation and Testing: Documents/Passages

● Continuously evaluate the model using

standard metrics (e.g., precision, recall,
Generative Model
BLEU, ROUGE) to ensure it meets (e.g., GPT - 3,T5)
accuracy, coherence, and relevance
benchmarks.
● Test the system in both general and
Generated Response Domain-Specific Fine
domain-specific environments, ensuring Tuning For Adaptation and
(Output)
scalability and adaptability. Precision
 System Designing
The system design for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model focuses on
integrating retrieval and generation components in a scalable, efficient, and adaptable manner.
This design ensures that the model can handle large datasets, generate contextually grounded
responses, and be fine-tuned for specific domains while maintaining real-time performance.

Key Components of the System Design:

User Interface (UI):

● Frontend: A web or application interface where users can input queries.

● Backend API: Communicates user requests to the RAG system, handling input/output
efficiently. It also ensures smooth interaction and handles real-time user requests for immediate
response.

Query Handler:

● The query handler receives the input from the user and preprocesses it, including tokenization,
query expansion, and potential reformatting.
● Sends the processed query to the retriever module for information extraction.
Retriever Module (Dense Passage Retrieval - DPR or BM25):
● The retriever fetches the top-k relevant documents or passages from the indexed data store using
algorithms like DPR, BM25, or other dense/sparse retrieval mechanisms.
● The retriever is optimized to balance speed and accuracy by efficiently narrowing down relevant
documents from a vast corpus.

Data Preprocessing and Indexing Engine:

● The preprocessing module is responsible for extracting, cleaning, and structuring data from raw,
unstructured documents (e.g., PDFs).
● The indexing engine builds a searchable vectorized index using techniques such as embeddings,
TF-IDF, or other transformer-based embeddings for efficient retrieval.
● Data Pipeline: The preprocessing, tokenization, and vectorization pipeline is established to
continuously process new incoming data (for dynamic systems).

Generative Model (GPT-3, T5, etc.):

● After retrieval, the generative model receives the top-k relevant passages and generates a response
based on the user query and the context provided by these documents.
● This model is fine-tuned for domain-specific data when required and integrated with retrieval to ensure
factual correctness and contextual relevance.
Fine-Tuning and Domain-Specific Adaptation Module:
● This module is responsible for fine-tuning the RAG model for specific industries (e.g., legal, healthcare,
financial) to enhance performance in specialized fields.
● It adapts the language model to the specific terminology and contextual needs of different domains by
continuous training on relevant domain-specific datasets.

Response Generation and Post-Processing:

● The system refines the generated response by performing post-processing steps like text refinement, grammar
correction, and fact verification (optional).
● This ensures the final output is coherent, fluent, and free from grammatical or factual errors.

Cache Management and Latency Optimization:

● The system implements caching for frequently retrieved documents or queries to reduce redundant retrieval
operations, improving real-time performance.
● Latency optimizations are achieved through asynchronous processing, parallelized retrieval/generation, and
load balancing techniques, ensuring real-time response generation for interactive applications.
Implementation
The implementation of a RAG model involves integrating both the retrieval and generation
components and ensuring they work seamlessly together. Below is a step-by-step guide to
implementing a RAG model using popular libraries like Hugging Face's transformers
and faiss for retrieval, and integrating a pre-trained language model for generation.

Steps to Implement the RAG Model:

1. Setup and Environment

● Install the necessary Python packages such as transformers, torch, faiss,

and datasets.

2. Data Preparation

● Data Ingestion: Load a large collection of unstructured documents (e.g., PDFs,

research papers, or legal documents). You can use datasets from Hugging Face,
or other document repositories.
● Preprocessing: Tokenize and clean the data, converting it into a suitable format
for both retrieval and generation.
3. Indexing the Documents (Retriever Component)

● Embedding the Documents: Use a Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) model to create embeddings of
the documents, allowing for similarity-based retrieval.
● FAISS Indexing: Use FAISS (Facebook AI Similarity Search) to build an index of these embeddings,
enabling fast similarity search.

4. Query Processing and Retrieval

● Query Encoder: Use the DPR question encoder to convert the user query into an embedding.
● Document Retrieval: Perform a similarity search on the FAISS index to retrieve the top-k relevant
documents based on the query embedding.

5. Generation from Retrieved Documents (Generator Component)

● Generative Model: Use a generative model like GPT-3, T5, or BART to generate an answer based on
the retrieved documents.
● Concatenate Retrieved Documents: Concatenate the top-k retrieved documents and feed them as
context to the generative model, alongside the user’s query.
6. Domain-Specific Fine-Tuning

● Fine-tune the retriever and generator on domain-specific data (e.g., legal documents,
medical texts) to improve the model’s performance in specialized fields.
● Use transfer learning to fine-tune the pre-trained models on specific datasets to adapt them
to niche requirements.

7. Real-Time Performance Optimization

● Caching: Implement a caching mechanism for frequently queried documents and responses
to reduce redundant retrieval.
● Parallel Processing: Optimize performance by parallelizing retrieval and generation
processes to minimize response time.

8. Evaluation and Metrics

● Evaluate the system using metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, and F1 score for accuracy and
relevance of generated responses.
● Fine-tune both retrieval and generation components based on user feedback or additional
training data.
Result
The results from the implementation of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model can be evaluated based
on several factors, including retrieval accuracy, response generation quality, and system performance. Below
is a breakdown of the expected outcomes and how to interpret them.

Retrieval Accuracy

The effectiveness of the retrieval component can be evaluated through metrics such as Precision, Recall, and F1
Score.

● Precision measures the proportion of retrieved documents that are relevant.

● Recall measures the proportion of relevant documents that were retrieved.
● F1 Score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall, providing a balance between the two metrics.

Response Generation Quality

The quality of the generated responses can be evaluated using metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR.
These metrics compare the generated output against reference answers.

● BLEU Score measures the overlap of n-grams between the generated response and the reference.
● ROUGE Score focuses on recall, measuring the overlap of words or sequences of words.
System Performance

Performance metrics for the entire RAG model can include latency, throughput, and resource utilization.

● Latency measures the time taken from receiving a query to generating a response.
● Throughput measures the number of queries processed in a given time frame.
● Resource Utilization involves monitoring CPU, GPU, and memory usage during processing.

Qualitative Analysis

In addition to quantitative metrics, qualitative analysis involves user feedback and subjective evaluations of
generated responses.

● User Feedback: Gathering feedback from users regarding the relevance, coherence, and usefulness of
the generated responses.
● Human Evaluation: Engaging domain experts to assess the quality of the output for accuracy and
contextual relevance.
Conclusion
The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model represents a significant advancement in
the field of natural language processing by effectively combining information retrieval and
generation capabilities. This approach leverages the strengths of both retrieval mechanisms and
generative models to provide contextually rich, accurate, and coherent responses to user
queries, particularly when dealing with vast and unstructured datasets.

Limitations
Dependence on Quality of Retrieved Documents: The performance of the RAG model heavily
relies on the quality and relevance of the retrieved documents. Poor retrieval can lead to
incoherent or inaccurate responses, as the generative model is limited by the context provided.

Contextual Understanding: While RAG can generate responses based on retrieved

information, it may struggle with understanding nuanced context or implicit information that is not
explicitly stated in the documents.
Computational Resource Demands: The model's reliance on large pre-trained language models
and retrieval systems can lead to high computational costs and resource utilization, making it less
accessible for smaller applications or organizations with limited infrastructure.

Latency in Complex Queries: For complex queries that require retrieving and processing
extensive information, latency can increase, potentially affecting user experience, especially in
real-time applications.

Future Scope
Improving Retrieval Techniques: Ongoing research can focus on developing more sophisticated
retrieval techniques, including combining dense and sparse retrieval methods to increase the
relevance and quality of retrieved documents.
Enhancing Contextual Understanding: Future iterations could incorporate models with better
contextual understanding, such as attention mechanisms or incorporating external knowledge
bases, to enhance the generation process.
Optimization for Resource Efficiency: Research into model compression techniques, such as
distillation and quantization, can help reduce the computational resource requirements, making the
RAG model more accessible to various applications.
Integration of Multimodal Data: Expanding the model to incorporate multimodal inputs (images, audio,
etc.) could enhance the richness of generated content, providing more comprehensive responses that
include various forms of information.
Addressing Bias and Fairness: Continuous efforts are needed to identify and mitigate biases in the
training data and retrieval process, ensuring that the model produces fair and unbiased responses.
User-Centric Adaptation: Developing mechanisms for user-specific adaptations, where the model learns
from individual user interactions to personalize responses, can enhance user satisfaction and
engagement.
References
● Lewis, P., et al. (2020). Retrieval-Augmented Generation for
Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. NeurIPS.
● Devlin, J., et al. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers
for Language Understanding. NAACL.
● Wolf, T., et al. (2020). Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language
Processing. EMNLP.
● Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Natural Language Processing: A Survey
● Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey
● https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/what-is-retrieval-augmented-generation/