RAG_Techniques

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Advanced RAG Techniques 🚀

Elevating Your Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

A community-driven hub of 42+ runnable notebooks covering RAG techniques from foundational to cutting-edge - the intuition, the code, and the references to build more accurate, context-rich retrieval systems.

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Introduction

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is revolutionizing the way we combine information retrieval with generative AI. This repository showcases a curated collection of advanced techniques designed to supercharge your RAG systems, enabling them to deliver more accurate, contextually relevant, and comprehensive responses.

Our goal is to provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners looking to push the boundaries of what's possible with RAG. By fostering a collaborative environment, we aim to accelerate innovation in this exciting field.

Related Projects

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🧠 Agent Memory Techniques - 30 notebooks on agent memory: vector stores, knowledge graphs, Mem0, MemGPT, Zep, Graphiti.

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Contributions make this better - propose ideas, share techniques, or give feedback via CONTRIBUTING.md.

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Key Features

• 🧠 State-of-the-art RAG enhancements
• 📚 Comprehensive documentation for each technique
• 🛠️ Practical implementation guidelines
• 🌟 Regular updates with the latest advancements

Advanced Techniques

Explore our extensive list of cutting-edge RAG techniques:

Recently added: Document Parsing with Mistral OCR 4.1 (sponsored by Mistral AI), MemoRAG (memory-augmented retrieval), End-to-End RAG Evaluation, Open-RAG-Eval, JSON RAG. 42 notebooks and growing.

#	Category	Technique	View
1	Foundational 🌱	Basic RAG
2	Foundational 🌱	RAG with CSV Files
3	Foundational 🌱	Reliable RAG
4	Foundational 🌱	Optimizing Chunk Sizes
5	Foundational 🌱	Proposition Chunking
6	Query Enhancement 🔍	Query Transformations
7	Query Enhancement 🔍	HyDE (Hypothetical Document Embedding)
8	Query Enhancement 🔍	HyPE (Hypothetical Prompt Embedding)
9	Context Enrichment 📚	Contextual Chunk Headers
10	Context Enrichment 📚	Relevant Segment Extraction
11	Context Enrichment 📚	Context Window Enhancement
12	Context Enrichment 📚	Semantic Chunking
13	Context Enrichment 📚	Contextual Compression
14	Context Enrichment 📚	Document Augmentation
15	Advanced Retrieval 🚀	Fusion Retrieval
16	Advanced Retrieval 🚀	Reranking
17	Advanced Retrieval 🚀	Multi-faceted Filtering
18	Advanced Retrieval 🚀	Hierarchical Indices
19	Advanced Retrieval 🚀	Dartboard Retrieval
20	Advanced Retrieval 🚀	Multi-modal RAG with Captioning
21	Iterative Techniques 🔁	Retrieval with Feedback Loop
22	Iterative Techniques 🔁	Adaptive Retrieval
23	Evaluation 📊	DeepEval
24	Evaluation 📊	GroUSE
25	Explainability 🔬	Explainable Retrieval
26	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	Graph RAG with LangChain
27	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	Microsoft GraphRAG
28	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	RAPTOR
29	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	Agentic RAG with Contextual AI
30	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	Self-RAG
31	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	Corrective RAG (CRAG)
32	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	Local Graph RAG with Verifiable Attribution
33	Advanced Architecture 🏗️	LightRAG
34	Evaluation 📊	End-to-End RAG Evaluation
35	Evaluation 📊	Open-RAG-Eval
36	Advanced 🔬	MemoRAG
37	Special Technique 🌟	Sophisticated Controllable Agent
38	Foundational 🌱	Document Parsing with Mistral OCR 4.1 (sponsored by Mistral AI)

🌱 Foundational RAG Techniques

1. Simple RAG 🌱

   • 🎬 Watch it explained: RAG Explained: Why AI Gets Your Own Documents Wrong — the intuition behind this notebook in 7 minutes: why chunks overlap, what "meaning space" actually is, and where simple RAG breaks down.
   • LangChain:
   • LlamaIndex:
   • Runnable Script

   Overview 🔎

   Introducing basic RAG techniques ideal for newcomers.

   Implementation 🛠️

   Start with basic retrieval queries and integrate incremental learning mechanisms.

2. Simple RAG using a CSV file 🧩

   • 🎬 Watch it explained: How Do You Search a Spreadsheet by Meaning? — turn each row into one labelled line and search the table by meaning; ask which customers are "in South American countries" and the Chile record comes back even though those words never appear.
   • LangChain:
   • LlamaIndex:

   Overview 🔎

   Introducing basic RAG using CSV files.

   Implementation 🛠️

   This uses CSV files to create basic retrieval and integrates with openai to create question and answering system.

3. Reliable RAG 🏷️:

   • 🎬 Watch it explained: How Do You Know Your RAG Answer Isn't Made Up? — the three checkpoints that catch a bad chunk on the way in and an unsupported claim on the way out, plus the source highlighting that lets a skeptical reader verify the answer themselves.

   Overview 🔎

   Enhances the Simple RAG by adding validation and refinement to ensure the accuracy and relevance of retrieved information.

   Implementation 🛠️

   Check for retrieved document relevancy and highlight the segment of docs used for answering.

4. Choose Chunk Size 📏

   • LangChain:
   • Runnable Script

   Overview 🔎

   Selecting an appropriate fixed size for text chunks to balance context preservation and retrieval efficiency.

   Implementation 🛠️

   Experiment with different chunk sizes to find the optimal balance between preserving context and maintaining retrieval speed for your specific use case.

5. Proposition Chunking ⛓️‍💥:

   • 🎬 Watch it explained: Why Does RAG Return a Paragraph When You Asked for One Fact? — why a paragraph's embedding is a blend that points at nothing in particular, how a language model rewrites the chunk as single self-contained facts, and what the quality gate throws away.

   Overview 🔎

   Breaking down the text into concise, complete, meaningful sentences allowing for better control and handling of specific queries (especially extracting knowledge).

   Implementation 🛠️

   • 💪 Proposition Generation: The LLM is used in conjunction with a custom prompt to generate factual statements from the document chunks.
   • ✅ Quality Checking: The generated propositions are passed through a grading system that evaluates accuracy, clarity, completeness, and conciseness.

6. Simple RAG with JSON

   Overview 🔎

   RAG with JSON documents is a method of using JSON files to create a retrieval and question answering system.

   Implementation 🛠️

   • 📄 Data Loading & Extraction: JSON data with multiple fields per entry is loaded, and most relevant text fields are combined to generate an embedding.
   • 🔍 Retrieval: The system retrieves the most relevant JSON entries based on the user's query.

38. Document Parsing with Mistral OCR 4.1 📄:

• Sponsored by Mistral AI

Overview 🔎

Most PDF-based techniques here start with a plain text extractor, and none of them checks what it produced. This notebook prints it, shows a results table losing its structure before indexing, and swaps the parsing step for Mistral OCR 4.1 while the rest of the pipeline stays identical.

Implementation 🛠️

• 🧪 Controlled comparison: the repository's own encode_pdf() pipeline, then the same pipeline with OCR 4.1 as the parser.
• 🧱 Block-aware chunking: OCR 4.1 labels every block, so each table stays whole together with its caption instead of being cut by a character splitter.
• 📈 Reranking all three pipelines: PyPDF ends with a confident wrong number, the block-aware pipeline with the right one.
• 💾 Runs without a Mistral key: the OCR output ships in data/mistral_ocr_cache/.

Additional Resources 📚

• The Propositions Method: Enhancing Information Retrieval for AI Systems - A comprehensive blog post exploring the benefits and implementation of proposition chunking in RAG systems.

🔍 Query Enhancement

6. Query Transformations 🔄

   • LangChain:
   • Runnable Script
   • 🎬 Watch it explained: Why Does RAG Miss an Answer That's Right There in Your Documents? — why the words in a question never quite line up with the words on the page, the three transformations (rewrite, step back, split) that fix the question instead of the index, and the rule that keeps the original question in charge of the answer.

   Overview 🔎

   Modifying and expanding queries to improve retrieval effectiveness.

   Implementation 🛠️

   • ✍️ Query Rewriting: Reformulate queries to improve retrieval.
   • 🔙 Step-back Prompting: Generate broader queries for better context retrieval.
   • 🧩 Sub-query Decomposition: Break complex queries into simpler sub-queries.

7. Hypothetical Questions (HyDE Approach) ❓

   • LangChain:
   • Runnable Script
   • 🎬 Watch it explained: HyDE for RAG: Search With a Fake Answer to Find the Real One — why a short question and a long document land far apart in embedding space even when they mean the same thing, why the made-up answer never has to be correct, and the two places the technique genuinely fails.

   Overview 🔎

   Generating hypothetical questions to improve alignment between queries and data.

   Implementation 🛠️

   Create hypothetical questions that point to relevant locations in the data, enhancing query-data matching.

   Additional Resources 📚

   • HyDE: Exploring Hypothetical Document Embeddings for AI Retrieval - A short blog post explaining this method clearly.

📚 Context and Content Enrichment

8. Hypothetical Prompt Embeddings (HyPE) ❓🚀

   • LangChain:
   • Runnable Script

   Overview 🔎

   HyPE (Hypothetical Prompt Embeddings) is an enhancement to traditional RAG retrieval that precomputes hypothetical prompts at the indexing stage, but inseting the chunk in their place. This transforms retrieval into a question-question matching task. This avoids the need for runtime synthetic answer generation, reducing inference-time computational overhead while improving retrieval alignment.

   Implementation 🛠️

   • 📖 Precomputed Questions: Instead of embedding document chunks, HyPE generates multiple hypothetical queries per chunk at indexing time.
   • 🔍 Question-Question Matching: User queries are matched against stored hypothetical questions, leading to better retrieval alignment.
   • ⚡ No Runtime Overhead: Unlike HyDE, HyPE does not require LLM calls at query time, making retrieval faster and cheaper.
   • 📈 Higher Precision & Recall: Improves retrieval context precision by up to 42 percentage points and claim recall by up to 45 percentage points.

   Additional Resources 📚

   • Preprint: Hypothetical Prompt Embeddings (HyPE) - Research paper detailing the method, evaluation, and benchmarks.

9. Contextual Chunk Headers :label::

   • 🎬 Watch it explained: Contextual Retrieval for RAG: Why Your Best Chunk Ranks Last — why a chunk that is exactly on topic still ranks last, what the pronouns cost you the moment the paragraph leaves its document, and the one kind of knowledge base where this does nothing at all.

   Overview 🔎

   Contextual chunk headers (CCH) is a method of creating document-level and section-level context, and prepending those chunk headers to the chunks prior to embedding them.

   Implementation 🛠️

   Create a chunk header that includes context about the document and/or section of the document, and prepend that to each chunk in order to improve the retrieval accuracy.

   Additional Resources 📚

   dsRAG: open-source retrieval engine that implements this technique (and a few other advanced RAG techniques)

10. Relevant Segment Extraction 🧩:

    Overview 🔎

    Relevant segment extraction (RSE) is a method of dynamically constructing multi-chunk segments of text that are relevant to a given query.

    Implementation 🛠️

    Perform a retrieval post-processing step that analyzes the most relevant chunks and identifies longer multi-chunk segments to provide more complete context to the LLM.

11. Context Enrichment Techniques 📝

• LangChain:
• LlamaIndex:
• Runnable Script

Overview 🔎

Enhancing retrieval accuracy by embedding individual sentences and extending context to neighboring sentences.

Implementation 🛠️

Retrieve the most relevant sentence while also accessing the sentences before and after it in the original text.

12. Semantic Chunking 🧠

• LangChain:
• Runnable Script

Overview 🔎

Dividing documents based on semantic coherence rather than fixed sizes.

Implementation 🛠️

Use NLP techniques to identify topic boundaries or coherent sections within documents for more meaningful retrieval units.

Additional Resources 📚

• Semantic Chunking: Improving AI Information Retrieval - A comprehensive blog post exploring the benefits and implementation of semantic chunking in RAG systems.

13. Contextual Compression 🗜️

• LangChain:
• Runnable Script

Overview 🔎

Compressing retrieved information while preserving query-relevant content.

Implementation 🛠️

Use an LLM to compress or summarize retrieved chunks, preserving key information relevant to the query.

14. Document Augmentation through Question Generation for Enhanced Retrieval

• LangChain:
• Runnable Script

Overview 🔎

This implementation demonstrates a text augmentation technique that leverages additional question generation to improve document retrieval within a vector database. By generating and incorporating various questions related to each text fragment, the system enhances the standard retrieval process, thus increasing the likelihood of finding relevant documents that can be utilized as context for generative question answering.

Implementation 🛠️

Use an LLM to augment text dataset with all possible questions that can be asked to each document.

🚀 Advanced Retrieval Methods

15. Fusion Retrieval 🔗

    • LangChain:
    • LlamaIndex:
    • Runnable Script

    Overview 🔎

    Optimizing search results by combining different retrieval methods.

    Implementation 🛠️

    Combine keyword-based search with vector-based search for more comprehensive and accurate retrieval.

16. Intelligent Reranking 📈

    • LangChain:
    • LlamaIndex:
    • Runnable Script

    Overview 🔎

    Applying advanced scoring mechanisms to improve the relevance ranking of retrieved results.

    Implementation 🛠️

    • 🧠 LLM-based Scoring: Use a language model to score the relevance of each retrieved chunk.
    • 🔀 Cross-Encoder Models: Re-encode both the query and retrieved documents jointly for similarity scoring.
    • 🏆 Metadata-enhanced Ranking: Incorporate metadata into the scoring process for more nuanced ranking.

    Additional Resources 📚

    • Relevance Revolution: How Re-ranking Transforms RAG Systems - A comprehensive blog post exploring the power of re-ranking in enhancing RAG system performance.

17. Multi-faceted Filtering 🔍

    • LangChain:
    • Runnable Script

    Overview 🔎

    Applying various filtering techniques to refine and improve the quality of retrieved results.

    Implementation 🛠️

    • 🏷️ Metadata Filtering: Apply filters based on attributes like date, source, author, or document type.
    • 📊 Similarity Thresholds: Set thresholds for relevance scores to keep only the most pertinent results.
    • 📄 Content Filtering: Remove results that don't match specific content criteria or essential keywords.
    • 🌈 Diversity Filtering: Ensure result diversity by filtering out near-duplicate entries.

18. Hierarchical Indices 🗂️

    • LangChain:
    • Runnable Script

    Overview 🔎

    Creating a multi-tiered system for efficient information navigation and retrieval.

    Implementation 🛠️

    Implement a two-tiered system for document summaries and detailed chunks, both containing metadata pointing to the same location in the data.

    Additional Resources 📚

    • Hierarchical Indices: Enhancing RAG Systems - A comprehensive blog post exploring the power of hierarchical indices in enhancing RAG system performance.

19. Dartboard Retrieval 🎯

    • LangChain:

    Overview 🔎

    Optimizing over Relevant Information Gain in Retrieval

    Implementation 🛠️

    • Combine both relevance and diversity into a single scoring function and directly optimize for it.
    • POC showing plain simple RAG underperforming when the database is dense, and the dartboard retrieval outperforming it.

20. Multi-modal Retrieval 📽️

    Overview 🔎

    Extending RAG capabilities to handle diverse data types for richer responses.

    Implementation 🛠️

    • Multi-model RAG with Multimedia Captioning: - Caption and store all the other multimedia data like pdfs, ppts, etc., with text data in