Designing and Evaluating Reliable RAG Systems

What you will go through

1. 1
   1 Step 1 of 12 ·4 min Define the Evidence Contract Define an evidence contract and diagnose where a RAG evidence pipeline fails in a versioned engineering-documentation case.
2. 2
   2 Step 2 of 12 ·5 min Build Evidence-Preserving Document Representations Design document chunks and metadata that preserve evidence, scope, attribution, and access constraints.
3. 3
   3 Step 3 of 12 ·5 min Diagnose Dense Retrieval Diagnose dense retrieval by validating representation compatibility, scoring conventions, and exact-versus-approximate search comparisons.
4. 4
   4 Step 4 of 12 ·5 min Combine Hybrid Retrieval with Correct Filtering Fuse lexical and dense candidate lists with reciprocal rank fusion while enforcing trusted authorization filters and preserving stable evidence identifiers.
5. 5
   5 Step 5 of 12 ·5 min Rerank and Assemble a Useful Context Use a bounded reranking stage and deliberate context assembly to retain the rule, exceptions, and citation links that make evidence useful.
6. 6
   6 Step 6 of 12 ·5 min Specify Grounded Answers and Abstention Define a grounded-answer policy that separates authority from evidence, cites supported claims, handles version scope and conflict, and abstains when the evidence cannot justify an answer.
7. 7
   7 Step 7 of 12 ·6 min Measure Retrieval with a Versioned Test Set Calculate stable-evidence retrieval metrics and use stage-level comparisons to identify where evidence disappears.
8. 8
   8 Step 8 of 12 ·6 min Evaluate Answers Separately from Retrieval Evaluate generated RAG answers independently of retrieval ranking by labeling claim support, calculating citation and abstention metrics, and using an oracle-context probe to localize failures.
9. 9
   9 Step 9 of 12 ·5 min Add Adaptive Retrieval for Diagnosed Failures Choose bounded adaptive retrieval only when failure analysis supports it, then evaluate it fairly against the simpler baseline.
10. 10
    10 Step 10 of 12 ·5 min Protect the Evidence and Trust Boundaries Audit RAG data flows for indirect prompt injection, unauthorized evidence exposure, and secondary leakage using layered controls.
11. 11
    11 Step 11 of 12 ·6 min Operate and Improve the System Safely Operate a RAG system with version-aware freshness, safe migrations, explicit budgets, and bounded release controls.
12. 12
    12 Step 12 of 12 ·7 min Complete an Evidence-Based RAG Design Review Use a final AtlasDB engineering-documentation case to audit evidence, controls, metrics, and a bounded release decision.