Towards Data Science

Break Your Own RAG Pipeline Before Users Do

The article discusses a small adversarial test set designed to detect retrieval failures in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that typical evaluation sets might miss. It emphasizes the importance of proactively testing your own RAG system to uncover hidden weaknesses before users encounter them. By using this targeted test set, developers can improve the reliability and robustness of their RAG models.

Towards Data Science
Aug 29

RAG Is Not the Whole Toolkit: The NLP Techniques Real Problems Still Need

The article argues that Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is only one tool in NLP, and many real-world problems—such as request classification, free‑text matching, table reading, and OCR noise cleaning—are better served by simpler, cheaper techniques. It emphasizes the importance of selecting the appropriate method for each task and highlights the engineering challenge of knowing which technique to apply.

By Kezhan Shi
Towards Data Science
Jun 16

RAG Questions Need Parsing Too: Turn the User’s String Into Briefs for Retrieval and Generation

Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol. 1 #6a] - Why a user question deserves the same parsing as the document, and how it splits into a retrieval brief and a generation brief before either runs The post RAG Questions Need Parsing Too: Turn the User’s String Into Briefs for Retrieval and Generation appeared first on Towards Data Science .

By angela shi
Towards Data Science
Jun 18

Dispatching the Parsed RAG Question: Chunk Strategy, Model Tier, Activations, Audit

Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol. 1 #6c] - The decisions the parser makes on top of the user string, using the document’s profile: dispatch, activations, full schema, three approaches to deciding what fires, the audit _meta block, and a broker-corpus walkthrough The post Dispatching the Parsed RAG Question: Chunk Strategy, Model Tier, Activations, Audit appeared first on Towards Data Science .

By angela shi
Towards Data Science
Jul 22

Loop Engineering for RAG Generation: Iterate top-k One at a Time

Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol. 1 #8bis] - Two regimes for sending retrieved candidates to the generation brick, the sufficiency signal that picks between them, and the per-question type dispatch that makes it cheap The post Loop Engineering for RAG Generation: Iterate top-k One at a Time appeared first on Towards Data Science .

By Kezhan Shi