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New short course on advanced retrieval for RAG (retrieval augmented generation)! RAG fetches relevant documents to give context to an LLM. In Advanced Retrieval for AI with Chroma, taught by Chroma founder anton 🇺🇸, you’ll learn: (i) Query expansion using an LLM to rewrite and improve a query, by... either generating either additional relevant queries or a hypothetical answer to the query. (ii) Reranking using a cross-encoder - a model trained to measure similarity between two inputs presented simultaneously. Reranking reorders retrieved documents based on the cross-encoder similarity measure. (iii) Constructing and training an Embedding Adaptor, which is a model that adapts the embedding values to be more relevant to your use case. Each of these techniques can help you build much better RAG systems. Please sign up for the course here:show more

Andrew Ng

1,511,076 subscribers

191,219 views • 2 years ago •via X (Twitter)

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10 Comments

Sigil Wen2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn BIG DOG @atroyn 🥶

Max Voitko2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn Chroma is based on SQLite which is good for experimentation but not production-tier db. I'm curious about what you use in production systems.

Waseem2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn Just signed up! Looking forward to this.

Mohamed2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn Great !

T_Abel2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn Thank you so much Andrew

AI/ML Jobs2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn 🚀🚀

ALI SIDI2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn Is this course available on Coursera?

Lakshay Chhabra2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn Thanks for this, it was very insightful.

Cezary Storczyk2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn So these are techniques that will allow the use of the data set possessed, without having to use it directly?

Mike Mansour2 years ago

@trychroma @atroyn by the time we learn this , there will be a totally new technique or a research paper that will deem it obsolete 😂

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104,371 views • 2 years ago

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DeepLearning.AI

14,702 views • 11 months ago

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150,317 views • 2 years ago

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596,792 views • 3 years ago

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Avthar

34,261 views • 1 year ago

There’s been two papers released in the past couple months, one by Google and one by NVIDIA, that argue that ordering the documents retrieved by RAG systems can enhance performance. However, they both give two different strategies on HOW these documents should be ordered 🤔 Both papers agree on two main points: 1️⃣ There’s a fundamental issue in RAG - as more documents are retrieved, more irrelevant context (e.g., hard negatives) are introduced, which leads to confusion for the LLM and eventually degrades the quality of the generated output. This is called an inverted-U performance curve. 2️⃣ Ordering the retrieved documents is a key lever for optimizing RAG performance. Google Cloud researchers proposed ordering results based on relevance scores: The authors in this paper argue for relevance-based reordering, or ordering the retrieved chunks based on their similarity scores, so the most relevant documents are at the beginning and the end of the inputs to counter the “lost in the middle” effect. NVIDIA researchers proposed ordering results based on the original sequence of document chunks: The authors of this paper argue for Order-Preserving Reordering, or Order-Preserve RAG (OP-RAG), to maintain the logically coherent content flow of the document. So they preserved the original order of retrieved document chunks in the source text, instead of ranking them by relevance scores. So which one is right? It probably depends on the specific use case and dataset - relevance-based reordering could perform better in tasks where you need fast access to the most critical information (e.g., fact retrieval, QA systems), while order-preserving RAG might be better where you need to understand the sequential structure of information (e.g., narrative or legal documents). There are still so many uncertainties in AI - we don’t actually know what we’re doing, and it takes awhile to figure out the best strategies for most things! Excited to see more research about this.

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Victoria Slocum

15,333 views • 1 year ago

Tokenization -- turning text into a sequence of integers -- is a key part of generative AI, and most API providers charge per million tokens. How does tokenization work? Learn the details of tokenization and RAG optimization in Retrieval Optimization: From Tokenization to Vector Quantization, created in collaboration with Qdrant and taught by its Developer Relations Lead, Kacper Łukawski. This course focuses on Retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which has two steps: First, a retriever finds relevant information; then, the generator uses what’s retrieved as context to produce a response. You’ll learn to optimize the first step (the retriever) by understanding how tokenization works and how it impacts the relevance of your search. In addition, you will also learn to measure and improve retrieval quality, speed, and memory. In detail, you’ll: - Learn about the internal workings of the embedding models and how your text turns into vectors. - Understand how several tokenizers, such as Byte-Pair Encoding, WordPiece, Unigram, and SentencePiece work. - Explore common challenges with tokenizers, such as unknown tokens, domain-specific identifiers, and numerical values, that can negatively affect your vector search. - Understand how to measure the quality of your search across relevance, ranking, and score-related metrics. - Understand how the main parameters in "HNSW", a graph-based algorithm, affect the relevance and speed of vector search, and how to tune its parameters. - Experiment with the three major quantization methods – product, scalar, and binary – and learn how they impact memory requirements, search quality, and speed. By the end of this course, you’ll have a solid understanding of how tokenization functions and how to optimize vector search in your RAG systems. Please sign up here!

Tokenization -- turning text into a sequence of integers -- is a key part of generative AI, and most API providers charge per million tokens. How does tokenization work? Learn the details of tokenization and RAG optimization in Retrieval Optimization: From Tokenization to Vector Quantization, created in collaboration with Qdrant and taught by its Developer Relations Lead, Kacper Łukawski. This course focuses on Retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which has two steps: First, a retriever finds relevant information; then, the generator uses what’s retrieved as context to produce a response. You’ll learn to optimize the first step (the retriever) by understanding how tokenization works and how it impacts the relevance of your search. In addition, you will also learn to measure and improve retrieval quality, speed, and memory. In detail, you’ll: - Learn about the internal workings of the embedding models and how your text turns into vectors. - Understand how several tokenizers, such as Byte-Pair Encoding, WordPiece, Unigram, and SentencePiece work. - Explore common challenges with tokenizers, such as unknown tokens, domain-specific identifiers, and numerical values, that can negatively affect your vector search. - Understand how to measure the quality of your search across relevance, ranking, and score-related metrics. - Understand how the main parameters in "HNSW", a graph-based algorithm, affect the relevance and speed of vector search, and how to tune its parameters. - Experiment with the three major quantization methods – product, scalar, and binary – and learn how they impact memory requirements, search quality, and speed. By the end of this course, you’ll have a solid understanding of how tokenization functions and how to optimize vector search in your RAG systems. Please sign up here!

Andrew Ng

146,313 views • 1 year ago

I’m excited to kick off the first of our short courses focused on agents, starting with Building Agentic RAG with LlamaIndex, taught by Jerry Liu, CEO of LlamaIndex 🦙. This covers an important shift in RAG (retrieval augmented generation), in which rather than having the developer write explicit routines to retrieve information to feed into the LLM context, we instead build a RAG agent that that has access to tools for retrieving information. This lets the agent decide what information to fetch, and enables it to answer more complex questions using multi-step reasoning. In detail, you'll learn about: - Routing: Where your agent will use decision-making to route requests to multiple tools. - Tool Use: Where you'll create an interface for agents to select what tool (function call) to use as well as generate the right arguments. - Multi-step reasoning with tool use: Where you'll use an LLM to carry out multiple steps of reasoning, while retaining memory throughout the process. You’ll also learn how to step through what your agent is doing to debug and improve it iteratively. It’s an exciting time to build agents. Sign up and get started here!

I’m excited to kick off the first of our short courses focused on agents, starting with Building Agentic RAG with LlamaIndex, taught by Jerry Liu, CEO of LlamaIndex 🦙. This covers an important shift in RAG (retrieval augmented generation), in which rather than having the developer write explicit routines to retrieve information to feed into the LLM context, we instead build a RAG agent that that has access to tools for retrieving information. This lets the agent decide what information to fetch, and enables it to answer more complex questions using multi-step reasoning. In detail, you'll learn about: - Routing: Where your agent will use decision-making to route requests to multiple tools. - Tool Use: Where you'll create an interface for agents to select what tool (function call) to use as well as generate the right arguments. - Multi-step reasoning with tool use: Where you'll use an LLM to carry out multiple steps of reasoning, while retaining memory throughout the process. You’ll also learn how to step through what your agent is doing to debug and improve it iteratively. It’s an exciting time to build agents. Sign up and get started here!

Andrew Ng

297,131 views • 2 years ago

Traditional (SQL) databases rely primarily on keyword-based searches to retrieve information. These searches match the exact words or phrases in your query to the text stored in the database. While effective for many applications, this method has limitations when it comes to understanding context or finding relevant information that doesn’t include the exact keywords. Hybrid search combines the strengths of traditional keyword-based BM25 search with the advanced capabilities of semantic search. To effectively implement a hybrid search, a vector database is essential. Vector databases go beyond just words; they understand the meaning behind the data. They transform data such as text, images, or audio into numerical representations called vectors. These vector embeddings enable the database to find similar items, even if they don't share exact keywords. When you integrate hybrid search with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, you can achieve higher accuracy in retrieved context and better output in generated responses. Learn more about RAG systems in this video with Victoria Slocum:

Traditional (SQL) databases rely primarily on keyword-based searches to retrieve information. These searches match the exact words or phrases in your query to the text stored in the database. While effective for many applications, this method has limitations when it comes to understanding context or finding relevant information that doesn’t include the exact keywords. Hybrid search combines the strengths of traditional keyword-based BM25 search with the advanced capabilities of semantic search. To effectively implement a hybrid search, a vector database is essential. Vector databases go beyond just words; they understand the meaning behind the data. They transform data such as text, images, or audio into numerical representations called vectors. These vector embeddings enable the database to find similar items, even if they don't share exact keywords. When you integrate hybrid search with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, you can achieve higher accuracy in retrieved context and better output in generated responses. Learn more about RAG systems in this video with Victoria Slocum:

Femke Plantinga

140,618 views • 2 years ago

Build a RAG Application from Scratch 🐕 This video covers the architecture behind Verba 0.3.0! The design behind Verba is to have an explicit manager for each core component of RAG pipelines (Read, Chunk, Embed, Retrieve, Generate) 1. ReaderManager: Load in your data (GitHubReader, PDFReader, SimpleReader, etc.) 2. ChunkManager: Chunk up your data into smaller bits (avoids hitting the token limit and results in better retrieval) 3. EmbeddingManager: Convert your data into embeddings (use OpenAI, Cohere, SentenceTransformer, etc.) 4. RetrieverManager: Retrieve the relevant context from your query 5. GenerationManager: Generate an answer from the retrieved chunks Test out Verba on the Weaviate AI Database docs/blogs here: Verba repo:

Build a RAG Application from Scratch 🐕 This video covers the architecture behind Verba 0.3.0! The design behind Verba is to have an explicit manager for each core component of RAG pipelines (Read, Chunk, Embed, Retrieve, Generate) 1. ReaderManager: Load in your data (GitHubReader, PDFReader, SimpleReader, etc.) 2. ChunkManager: Chunk up your data into smaller bits (avoids hitting the token limit and results in better retrieval) 3. EmbeddingManager: Convert your data into embeddings (use OpenAI, Cohere, SentenceTransformer, etc.) 4. RetrieverManager: Retrieve the relevant context from your query 5. GenerationManager: Generate an answer from the retrieved chunks Test out Verba on the Weaviate AI Database docs/blogs here: Verba repo:

Erika Shorten

155,273 views • 2 years ago

New short course: Evaluating AI Agents! Evals are important for driving AI system improvements, and in this course you'll learn to systematically assess and improve an AI agent’s performance. This is built in partnership with Arize AI and taught by John Gilhuly, Head of Developer Relations, and , Director of Product. I've often found evals to be a critical tool in the agent development process - they can be the difference between picking the right thing to work on vs. wasting weeks of effort. Whether you’re building a shopping assistant, coding agent, or research assistant, having a structured evaluation process helps you refine its performance systematically, rather than relying on random trial and error. This course shows you how to structure your evals to assess the performance of each component of an agent and its end-to-end performance. For each component, you select the appropriate evaluators, test examples, and performance metrics. This helps you identify areas for improvement both during development and in production. (If you're familiar with error analysis in supervised learning, think of this as adapting those ideas to agentic workflows.) In this course, you'll build an AI agent, and add observability to visualize and debug its steps. You’ll learn about code-based evals, in which you write code explicitly to test a certain step, as well as LLM-as-a-Judge evals, in which you prompt an LLM to efficiently come up with ways to evaluate more open-ended outputs. In detail, you’ll: - Understand key differences between evaluating LLM-based systems and traditional software testing. - Add observability to an agent by collecting traces of the steps taken by the agent and visualizing them - Choose the appropriate evaluator - code-based, LLM-as-a-Judge, human-annotation based - for each component. - Compute a convergence score to evaluate if your agent can respond to a query in an efficient number of steps. - Run structured experiments to improve the agent’s performance by exploring changes to the prompt, LLM model, or the agent’s logic. - Understand how to deploy these evaluation techniques to monitor the agent’s performance in production. By the end of this course, you’ll know how to trace AI agents, systematically evaluate them, and improve their performance. Please sign up here:

New short course: Evaluating AI Agents! Evals are important for driving AI system improvements, and in this course you'll learn to systematically assess and improve an AI agent’s performance. This is built in partnership with Arize AI and taught by John Gilhuly, Head of Developer Relations, and , Director of Product. I've often found evals to be a critical tool in the agent development process - they can be the difference between picking the right thing to work on vs. wasting weeks of effort. Whether you’re building a shopping assistant, coding agent, or research assistant, having a structured evaluation process helps you refine its performance systematically, rather than relying on random trial and error. This course shows you how to structure your evals to assess the performance of each component of an agent and its end-to-end performance. For each component, you select the appropriate evaluators, test examples, and performance metrics. This helps you identify areas for improvement both during development and in production. (If you're familiar with error analysis in supervised learning, think of this as adapting those ideas to agentic workflows.) In this course, you'll build an AI agent, and add observability to visualize and debug its steps. You’ll learn about code-based evals, in which you write code explicitly to test a certain step, as well as LLM-as-a-Judge evals, in which you prompt an LLM to efficiently come up with ways to evaluate more open-ended outputs. In detail, you’ll: - Understand key differences between evaluating LLM-based systems and traditional software testing. - Add observability to an agent by collecting traces of the steps taken by the agent and visualizing them - Choose the appropriate evaluator - code-based, LLM-as-a-Judge, human-annotation based - for each component. - Compute a convergence score to evaluate if your agent can respond to a query in an efficient number of steps. - Run structured experiments to improve the agent’s performance by exploring changes to the prompt, LLM model, or the agent’s logic. - Understand how to deploy these evaluation techniques to monitor the agent’s performance in production. By the end of this course, you’ll know how to trace AI agents, systematically evaluate them, and improve their performance. Please sign up here:

Andrew Ng

126,462 views • 1 year ago

New short course: Build Long-Context AI Apps with Jamba. Learn about state space models (SSMs), which have emerged as an alternative to transformers! Specifically, Jamba is a hybrid transformer-Mamba architecture that combines strengths of the transformer with ideas from SSMs. This course is built with AI21 Labs and taught by Chen Wang and Chen Almagor. The transformer architecture is computationally expensive when handling very long input contexts. But there's an alternative called Mamba, a selective state space model that can process very long contexts with a much lower computational cost. However, researchers found that the pure Mamba architecture underperforms in understanding the context, and gives lower-quality responses. To overcome this, AI21 developed the Jamba model, which combines Mamba's computational efficiency with the transformer's attention mechanism to help with the output quality. In this course, you’ll learn about how state space models, and Jamba, work. You’ll also learn how to prompt Jamba, use it to process long documents, and build long-context RAG apps. - Learn how Jamba combines transformer and state space model architectures to achieve high performance and quality - Use the AI21 SDK, with an example of prompting over a large 200k-token annual financial report of Nvidia - Use Jamba for tool-calling, with hands-on examples from calling simple arithmetic calculations to a function that returns quarterly company financial reports. - Learn how training for long context is done, and the metrics used for its evaluation - Create a RAG app using the AI21 Conversational RAG tool and build your own RAG pipeline that uses Jamba and LangChain. By the end of this course, you'll learn how to build applications that can handle context as long as an entire book. Please sign up here:

New short course: Build Long-Context AI Apps with Jamba. Learn about state space models (SSMs), which have emerged as an alternative to transformers! Specifically, Jamba is a hybrid transformer-Mamba architecture that combines strengths of the transformer with ideas from SSMs. This course is built with AI21 Labs and taught by Chen Wang and Chen Almagor. The transformer architecture is computationally expensive when handling very long input contexts. But there's an alternative called Mamba, a selective state space model that can process very long contexts with a much lower computational cost. However, researchers found that the pure Mamba architecture underperforms in understanding the context, and gives lower-quality responses. To overcome this, AI21 developed the Jamba model, which combines Mamba's computational efficiency with the transformer's attention mechanism to help with the output quality. In this course, you’ll learn about how state space models, and Jamba, work. You’ll also learn how to prompt Jamba, use it to process long documents, and build long-context RAG apps. - Learn how Jamba combines transformer and state space model architectures to achieve high performance and quality - Use the AI21 SDK, with an example of prompting over a large 200k-token annual financial report of Nvidia - Use Jamba for tool-calling, with hands-on examples from calling simple arithmetic calculations to a function that returns quarterly company financial reports. - Learn how training for long context is done, and the metrics used for its evaluation - Create a RAG app using the AI21 Conversational RAG tool and build your own RAG pipeline that uses Jamba and LangChain. By the end of this course, you'll learn how to build applications that can handle context as long as an entire book. Please sign up here:

Andrew Ng

77,792 views • 1 year ago