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Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

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Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#11

Cool product. Few Qs: - What would you say is the agentic approach's special sauce over a typical RAG pipeline, ie query->multi-query generation->HyDE->vector search->bm25 search->RRF->rerank->evaluate->(retry|refuse|respond) that differentiates the approach? - If a user has 20 services connected, how does the agent know how to call/search/traverse the information in the right order? - Do you have any internal evals…

If I understand correctly, they are indexing all of the docs together rather than relying on the agent to retrieve them.

That sounds like RAG though, right?

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#12

Very cool! One question: how do you handle permissions? Different apps have different permissions models, not everyone is allowed to see everything. Do you attempt to model this complexity at all or normalize it to some general permissions model?

It appears the answer (if you want differentiated permissions, e.g. user vs admin, or role based access control) is "purchase the enterprise edition" - https://docs.onyx.app/enterprise_edition/overview

edit: added clarification

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#13

Onyx is as close as to magic you can get in this space. It just. Works. I can talk for literally hours about how good it is when you connect it to your company's Confluence or Jira or Slack or Google Drive or a ton of other things. At a scale of many tens of thousands of documents too. Their team is awesome too and completely tuned into exactly what their users need. And that it's open source is the cherry on top. No…

Amazing to hear from a happy user! Thanks for the kind words!

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#14

The demo looked sharp but I am curious if you have done any formal evaluation of the quality of the results? For example, MRR and recall@k, even on a toy dataset? Seems like the quality of the generated responses will be highly dependent on the docs which are retrieved.

I am also interested in how to do eval on an open source corporate search system. Privacy and information security make this challenging, right?

On privacy and security, we are the only option (as far as I know) that you can connect up to all your company internal docs and have it be all processed locally to the deployment and stored at rest within the deployment.

So basically you can have it completely airgapped from the outside world, the only tough part is the local LLM but there are lots of options for that these days.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#15

Cool product. Few Qs: - What would you say is the agentic approach's special sauce over a typical RAG pipeline, ie query->multi-query generation->HyDE->vector search->bm25 search->RRF->rerank->evaluate->(retry|refuse|respond) that differentiates the approach? - If a user has 20 services connected, how does the agent know how to call/search/traverse the information in the right order? - Do you have any internal evals…

Quite a lot to cover here! So in addition to the typical RAG pipeline, we have many other signals like learning from user feedback, time based weighting, metadata handling, weighting between title/content, and different custom deep learning models that run at inference and indexing time all to help the retrieval. But this is all part of the RAG component.

The agent part is the loop of running the LLM over RAG system and letting it decide which questions it wants to explore more (some similarities to retry|refuse|respond I guess?). We also have the model do CoT over its own results including over the subquestions it generates.

Essentially it is the deep research paradigm with some more parallelism and a document index backing it.

How does the agent traverse the information: there are index-free approaches where the LLM has to use the searches of the tools. This gives worse results than approaches that build a coherent index across sources. We use the latter approach. So the search occurs over our index which is a central place for all the knowledge across all connected tools.

Do you have any internal evals on how well the different model affect the overall quality of output, esp for a "deep search" type of task? I have model-picker fatigue: Yes, we have datasets that we use internally. It comprises of "company type data" rather than "web type" data (like short Slack messages, very technical design documents, etc.) comprising about 10K documents and 500 questions.

For which model to use: it was developed primarily against gpt-4o but we retuned the prompts to work with all the recent models like Claude 3.5, Gemini, Deepseek, etc.

Do you plan to implement knowledge graphs in the future? Yes! We're looking into customizing LLM based knowledge graphs like LightGraphRAG (inspired by, but not the same).

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, they are indexing all of the docs together rather than relying on the agent to retrieve them.

That sounds like RAG though, right?

It's like how OpenAI's deep research works by searching the internet, ours works by searching over our "RAG" system that indexes company documents.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#18

Very cool! One question: how do you handle permissions? Different apps have different permissions models, not everyone is allowed to see everything. Do you attempt to model this complexity at all or normalize it to some general permissions model?

This is a large challenge in itself actually. Every external tool has it's own framework for permissions (necessarily so).

For example, Google Drive docs have permissions like "global public", "domain public", "private" where "private" is shared with users and groups and there's also the document owner.

Slack has public channels, private channels, DMs, group DMs.

So we need to map these external objects and their external users/groups into a unified representation within Onyx.

Then there are additional challenges like rate limiting so we cannot poll at subsecond intervals.

The way that we do it is we have async jobs that check for object permission updates and group/user updates against the external sources at a configurable frequency (with defaults that depend on the external source type).

Of course, always failing-closed instead of failing-open and defaulting to least permissive.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#19

How is the data stored? E.g. for concerns about internal data leaking out?

Assuming self-hosting, data is processed within the deployment with local deep learning models for embedding, identifying low information documents, etc. A hybrid keyword/vector index is built locally within the deployment as well.

At rest, the data is stored in Postgres and Vespa (the hybrid index), both of which are part of the deployment so it's all local.

The part that typically goes external is the LLM but many teams also host local LLMs to use with Onyx. In either case, the LLM is not being finetuned, the knowledge relevant to the question is passed in as part of the user message.

We built Onyx with data security in mind so we're very proud of the way the data flows within the system. We made the system work well with models that can run without GPUs as well so our users can get good quality results even if deploying on a laptop.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications

#20

The demo looked sharp but I am curious if you have done any formal evaluation of the quality of the results? For example, MRR and recall@k, even on a toy dataset? Seems like the quality of the generated responses will be highly dependent on the docs which are retrieved.

We have a dataset that we use internally to evaluate our search quality. It's more representative of our use case since it contains Slack messages, call transcripts, very technical design docs, company policies which is pretty different from what embedding models are typically trained on.

We checked the recall at 4K tokens (which was a pretty typical token limit of the previous generation of LLMs) and we were at over 94% recall for our 10K document set. We also added a lot of noise to it (Slack messages from public Slack workspaces) to get hundreds of thousands of documents but recall remained at over 90%.

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