Why RAG Answers Fall Short and How Query Enrichment Can Help
❓Why do the users of RAG describe the answers as ‘correct but not useful’? How can the RAG pipeline be improved to avoid this? π RAG user: ‘this answer is good, but it is not useful to me. It should have also mentioned a few more things’. π€ RAG Developer: ‘this looks perfectly good to me. I am myself amazed how my program is able to produce such a beautiful answer’. One will encounter many such interactions while putting RAG into production. During the prototyping, when RAG starts producing correct answers, there is a feeling of awe and surprise. But when the actual users start using it for day-to-day use, they find the answers very basic. They say that they can find these answers reasonably quickly without the tool. Why does this happen? π€¨ In my previous posts, I described how RAG works. It basically has three parts: 1️⃣Retrieve the material relevant to users' query. 2️⃣Augment the prompt with the material. 3️⃣Generate the answer using an LLM. Each of the above parts can be im...