AI & Machine Learning

RAG Implementation

Production retrieval-augmented generation with vector stores, hybrid search, reranking, citation, and observability — so you can trust the answers.

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Overview

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets LLMs answer questions grounded in your documents — but most RAG demos fall apart in production. They hallucinate, miss obvious context, return stale data, and give no way to verify answers. The gap between a LangChain tutorial and a production RAG system is enormous.

CB4UHost builds production RAG systems that actually work. We handle vector store selection (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant), hybrid search (keyword + semantic), reranking (Cohere, cross-encoders), citation, source attribution, and observability so you can see exactly which chunks informed each answer.

We're vector-store-neutral. The right choice depends on your data volume, query pattern, latency targets, and existing stack — not on which vendor has the best marketing page. We benchmark 2-3 options before recommending.

Every RAG engagement ends with eval reports (precision, recall, answer quality), observability dashboards, and runbooks for adding new documents, reindexing, and troubleshooting bad answers.

What's included

Vector store selection

We benchmark pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, and Qdrant against your data and recommend the right fit.

Document ingestion pipeline

ETL for your documents (PDF, Confluence, Notion, web, databases) with chunking strategy tuned to your content.

Hybrid search + reranking

Keyword + semantic search with cross-encoder reranking — dramatically better recall than pure vector search.

Citation + source attribution

Every answer cites the source chunks so users can verify — critical for legal, medical, and compliance use cases.

Observability + eval

Dashboards showing query latency, retrieval precision, answer quality, and failure modes — so you can trust the system.

Production deployment

vLLM/TGI serving, caching, rate limiting, and fallback to GPT-4/Claude when the open-source model is unsure.

How we work

1

Use case + data discovery

We define the use case, inventory your documents, and establish baseline quality metrics for current answer quality.

2

Vector store benchmark

We benchmark 2-3 vector stores against your data volume and query pattern, then recommend.

3

Pipeline build

We build the ingestion, embedding, retrieval, and generation pipeline with hybrid search and reranking.

4

Eval + iteration

We run a held-out eval set, iterate on chunking and retrieval, and report precision/recall/answer quality.

5

Production deploy + handover

We deploy to production with observability and hand over runbooks for adding documents and troubleshooting.

FAQ

Which vector store should I use?

It depends. pgvector is great if you're already on Postgres and have <10M vectors. Pinecone is best for managed scale. Weaviate and Qdrant are excellent self-hosted options. We benchmark before recommending.

How do you prevent hallucinations?

Three ways: (1) hybrid search with reranking retrieves better context, (2) the prompt instructs the model to say 'I don't know' when context is insufficient, and (3) every answer cites sources so users can verify.

Can RAG work with our existing LLM API (OpenAI, Anthropic)?

Yes. We can build RAG on top of GPT-4, Claude, or open-source models. Many clients start with GPT-4 + RAG, then migrate to a fine-tuned open-source model once they have eval data.

How do you handle stale documents?

We build reindexing pipelines with change detection (file mtime, database triggers, webhook from your CMS) so the index stays current. We also add cache invalidation for answers that reference updated documents.

Ready to talk?

Tell us about your project. We'll come back with a scoped proposal and a fixed-fee quote.

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