SophiArch
AdvancedAI402

Retrieval & RAG Systems

For engineers who have built LLM applications and hit the ceiling of naive RAG. This course covers chunking as a retrieval design decision, hybrid BM25-plus-dense search with reciprocal rank fusion, query rewriting, cross-encoder re-ranking, retrieval metrics (recall@k, MRR, nDCG), faithfulness and groundedness evals, index freshness, permission-aware retrieval, and auditing AI-generated RAG pipelines.

Lessons are AI-assisted and human-reviewed. Learn more.

Syllabus

Retrieval Foundations, Deepened

01
Why Retrieval Quality Decides RAG QualityFree preview
30 min
02
Chunking Strategies: The Decision AI Tools Get Wrong
35 min
03
Hybrid Retrieval: BM25 + Dense Fusion and RRF
40 min
04
Query Rewriting: HyDE, Multi-Query, and Decomposition
40 min

Ranking & Evaluation

05
Re-Ranking with Cross-Encoders at Production Scale
40 min
06
Retrieval Metrics: Recall@k, MRR, and nDCG
40 min
07
RAG Evals: Faithfulness, Groundedness, and Citations
40 min

Production RAG Systems

08
Index Maintenance: Freshness, Updates, and Embedding Drift
40 min
09
Permission-Aware and Multi-Tenant Retrieval
40 min
10
RAG Observability and Cost
40 min

Advanced Patterns

11
Agentic and Iterative Retrieval
40 min
12
Auditing an AI-Built RAG Pipeline: Capstone
45 min