Retrieval Augmented Generation (Syllabus)
Chapter 1: Foundations of Retrieval Augmented Generation
1. Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Overview of natural language processing
- Transformer architecture and attention mechanisms
- Pre-training and fine-tuning concepts
Hands-on: Explore a pre-trained LLM using Hugging Face Transformers library
Exercise: Implement a simple text generation task using a pre-trained model
2. Understanding Retrieval Augmented Generation
- Limitations of traditional LLMs
- Concept of external knowledge integration
- RAG architecture overview
- Comparison with other knowledge-enhanced LLM approaches
Hands-on: Analyze differences between standard LLM outputs and RAG
outputs
Exercise: Gather information on potential applications of RAG in various
industries
3. Components of RAG Systems
- Document stores and vector databases
- Embedding models and semantic search
- Query processing and reformulation
- Retriever-Reader architecture
Hands-on: Set up a simple vector database using FAISS or Pinecone
Exercise: Implement basic semantic search using sentence transformers
4. Basic RAG Pipeline
- Data preprocessing and chunking
- Indexing and storage
- Retrieval process
- Generation with context
Hands-on: Build a basic RAG pipeline using langchain or llama_index
Exercise: Create a simple question-answering system using RAG
Chapter 2: Advanced RAG Techniques and Optimizations
1. Improved Retrieval Methods
- Dense passage retrieval
- Hybrid search (combining sparse and dense retrievals)
- Re-ranking techniques
- Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search
Hands-on: Implement dense passage retrieval using DPR models
Exercise: Develop a hybrid search system and compare its performance with
basic retrieval
2. Query Processing Enhancements
- Query expansion and reformulation
- Query decomposition for complex questions
- Conversational context management
- Multi-hop reasoning in RAG
Hands-on: Implement query expansion using synonyms and related terms
Exercise: Build a system that can handle multi-turn conversations using RAG
3. Advanced Indexing and Chunking Strategies
- Sliding window approaches
- Hierarchical chunking
- Metadata-aware indexing
- Dynamic document updating
Hands-on: Experiment with different chunking strategies on a diverse dataset
Exercise: Develop an indexing system that preserves document structure and
metadata
4. Prompt Engineering for RAG
- Designing effective prompts for retrieval
- Context integration techniques
- Handling multiple retrieved passages
- Few-shot prompting in RAG
Hands-on: Experiment with various prompt structures for RAG
Exercise: Optimize a RAG system's performance through prompt engineering
Chapter 3: Evaluating, Fine-tuning, and Optimizing RAG
Systems
1. Evaluation Metrics for RAG
- Relevance and coherence metrics
- Factual consistency and hallucination detection
- Task-specific evaluation frameworks
- Human evaluation protocols
Hands-on: Implement ROUGE and BERTScore for RAG output evaluation
Exercise: Develop a custom evaluation pipeline for a specific RAG application
2. Fine-tuning Strategies for RAG
- Retriever fine-tuning techniques
- Generator fine-tuning for context integration
- End-to-end fine-tuning approaches
- Domain adaptation methods
Hands-on: Fine-tune a retriever model on a domain-specific dataset
Exercise: Implement and compare different fine-tuning strategies for a RAG
system
3. Handling Edge Cases and Failures
- Strategies for no relevant information scenarios
- Confidence estimation and fallback mechanisms
- Dealing with contradictory information
- Out-of-distribution query handling
Hands-on: Implement a confidence estimation module for RAG outputs
Exercise: Develop a RAG system that gracefully handles various edge cases
4. Performance Optimization
- Caching strategies
- Model quantization and pruning
- Batching and parallelization techniques
- Hardware acceleration for RAG systems
Hands-on: Implement a caching layer for frequently accessed documents
Exercise: Optimize a RAG system for low-latency responses
Chapter 4: Advanced Applications, Architectures, and Future
Directions
1. Multi-modal RAG Systems
- Incorporating image and video data
- Audio-based retrieval and generation
- Cross-modal retrieval techniques
Hands-on: Extend a RAG system to handle image-text queries
Exercise: Develop a multi-modal RAG application (e.g., visual question
answering)
2. Distributed and Scalable RAG Architectures
- Sharding and distributed indexing
- Load balancing strategies
- Real-time updating of knowledge bases
- Cloud-based RAG deployments
Hands-on: Set up a distributed RAG system using multiple servers
Exercise: Design and implement a scalable RAG architecture for high-
throughput scenarios
3. Ethical Considerations and Bias Mitigation
- Identifying and addressing biases in retrieval and generation
- Ensuring source credibility and diversity
- Privacy-preserving RAG techniques
- Explainable AI in RAG systems
Hands-on: Analyze a RAG system for potential biases
Exercise: Implement bias mitigation strategies in a RAG pipeline
4. Emerging Trends and Research Directions
- Few-shot and zero-shot learning in RAG
- Self-improving RAG systems
- Integration with other AI technologies (e.g., reinforcement learning, causal
inference)
- RAG for code generation and analysis
Hands-on: Experiment with few-shot learning techniques in RAG.
