Towards Data Science

RAG vs Fine-Tuning Explained: What They Actually Do and When to Use Each

Two techniques, two different problems, and why the question is not really "which one wins" The post RAG vs Fine-Tuning Explained: What They Actually Do and When to Use Each appeared first on Towards Data Science .

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
May 29

RAG Is Burning Money — I Built a Cost Control Layer to Fix It

Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost—and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circuit breaking, achieving an 85% reduction in LLM costs without sacrificing answer quality.

By Emmimal P Alexander