rag

RAG Implementation

Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems that extend AI capabilities with external knowledge sources.

Overview

This skill covers: document processing, embedding generation, vector storage, retrieval configuration, and RAG pipeline implementation.

When to Use

• Building Q&A systems over proprietary documents
• Creating chatbots with factual information from knowledge bases
• Implementing semantic search with natural language queries
• Reducing hallucinations with grounded, sourced responses
• Building documentation assistants and research tools
• Enabling AI systems to access domain-specific knowledge

Instructions

Step 1: Choose Vector Database

Select based on your requirements:

Requirement	Recommended
Production scalability	Pinecone, Milvus
Open-source	Weaviate, Qdrant
Local development	Chroma, FAISS
Hybrid search	Weaviate with BM25

Step 2: Select Embedding Model

Use Case	Model
General purpose	text-embedding-ada-002
Fast and lightweight	all-MiniLM-L6-v2
Multilingual	e5-large-v2
Best performance	bge-large-en-v1.5

Step 3: Implement Document Processing Pipeline

1. Load documents from source (file system, database, API)
2. Clean and preprocess (remove formatting, normalize text)
3. Split documents into chunks with appropriate strategy
4. Generate embeddings for each chunk
5. Store embeddings in vector database with metadata

Validation: Verify embeddings were generated successfully:

List<Embedding> embeddings = embeddingModel.embedAll(segments);
if (embeddings.isEmpty() || embeddings.get(0).dimension() != expectedDim) {
    throw new IllegalStateException("Embedding generation failed");
}

Step 4: Configure Retrieval Strategy

Choose the appropriate strategy:

• Dense Retrieval: Semantic similarity via embeddings (default for most cases)
• Hybrid Search: Dense + sparse retrieval for better coverage
• Metadata Filtering: Filter by document attributes
• Reranking: Cross-encoder reranking for high-precision requirements