Am I wrong to be somewhat peeved by the use of "RAG" in these contexts? I always read things like this, and wonder if instead the author should be saying "Semantic Retrieval" or something something Vector, etc. Retrieval augmented generation captures tool-use, and; semantic search of course is really just a tool under the hood. To make an anology, in my mind, this is akin to saying "fuel air mixture system" when refe…
Yes you are wrong. RAG means retrieval-augmented generation. If you’re generating something and that generation is augmented by some retrieval you’re doing RAG. The retrieval doesn’t need to be from a vector db or even based on semantic similarity.
Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
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Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#42"Three knobs matter:" I can't help reading articles with the radar on for signs of AI-generation nowadays. I have noticed that Claude sometimes uses the word knob for parameter, so here I get suspicious.
I am being constantly mocked for using there term 'knob fiddling', but I am a British child of the 70's :-)
Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes you are wrong. RAG means retrieval-augmented generation. If you’re generating something and that generation is augmented by some retrieval you’re doing RAG. The retrieval doesn’t need to be from a vector db or even based on semantic similarity.
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Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#44Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read “RAG Context” as “the retrieved content injected into the context window”
So when an agent does "cat file.txt" that's RAG to you?
> So when an agent does "cat file.txt" that's RAG to you?
No, that might be "RAG Context" though.
Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#46Am I wrong to be somewhat peeved by the use of "RAG" in these contexts? I always read things like this, and wonder if instead the author should be saying "Semantic Retrieval" or something something Vector, etc. Retrieval augmented generation captures tool-use, and; semantic search of course is really just a tool under the hood. To make an anology, in my mind, this is akin to saying "fuel air mixture system" when refe…
RAG is a fancy acronym that basically boils down to: let's give ai agents the super power of information retrieval (aka. search) and "augment" the generation with a list of results by adding that to the context. The narrow interpretation of this is usually some kind of vector search. Which some people naively treat as magic pixie dust that will make search quality amazing without any tuning whatsoever. This does not…
I use it to retrieve tool functions by description and it has worked very well for me, but I expect I'm in the "very simple use cases" category that you mentioned.
Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#47Did you experiment with the Pruner completely replacing the Reranker?
Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#48Did you experiment with the Pruner completely replacing the Reranker?
Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#49Re: Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
#50Did you experiment with the Pruner completely replacing the Reranker?