Notes / tag / retrieval-and-knowledge-systems

#retrieval-and-knowledge-systems

9 notes

1. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Covers the core RAG pipeline of indexing, retrieval, and generation, and why retrieval quality bounds answer quality regardless of how large the LLM's context window is.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

2. Embeddings

Explains how embedding models turn text into dense vectors and the dimensionality, cost, and quality tradeoffs an architect weighs when picking a commercial versus open-source embedding model.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

3. Chunking Strategies

Compares fixed-size, recursive, and semantic chunking strategies and how chunk boundary choices determine whether retrieved passages preserve the meaning needed to answer a query.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

4. Vector Search

Covers the approximate nearest neighbor algorithms (HNSW, IVF) behind vector databases and the recall, latency, and memory tradeoffs involved in choosing an index type at scale.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

5. Hybrid Search

Explains why combining dense vector similarity with sparse keyword search (BM25) outperforms either alone, and how to fuse and weight the two result sets.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

6. Reranking

Covers cross-encoder reranking models that reorder an initial retrieval candidate set for precision, and when the added latency cost is justified in a production pipeline.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

8. Agentic RAG

Covers RAG architectures where an agent decides when and what to retrieve, iteratively refining queries and evaluating retrieved evidence rather than retrieving once up front.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

9. GraphRAG

Explains how knowledge-graph-structured retrieval captures entity relationships and multi-hop reasoning that pure vector similarity search misses.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book

10. Multi-Stage Retrieval

Covers pipelines that chain coarse-to-fine retrieval stages, from candidate generation through filtering to reranking, to balance recall and precision at scale.

agentic-ai-engineering retrieval-and-knowledge-systems book