Retrieval Evaluation Metrics: Measuring What Matters in Search and RAG Systems

Introduction: Retrieval evaluation is the foundation of building effective RAG systems and search applications. Without proper metrics, you’re flying blind—unable to tell if your retrieval improvements actually help or hurt end-user experience. This guide covers the essential metrics for evaluating retrieval systems: precision and recall at various cutoffs, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), Normalized Discounted Cumulative […]

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Retrieval Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT): Training LLMs to Excel at RAG Tasks

Introduction: Retrieval Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) represents a powerful approach to improving LLM performance on domain-specific tasks by combining the benefits of fine-tuning with retrieval-augmented generation. Traditional RAG systems retrieve relevant documents at inference time and include them in the prompt, but the base model wasn’t trained to effectively use retrieved context. RAFT addresses this by […]

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Event-Driven Architecture on GCP: Mastering Cloud Pub/Sub for Real-Time Systems

Google Cloud Pub/Sub provides the foundation for event-driven architectures at any scale, offering globally distributed messaging with exactly-once delivery semantics and sub-second latency. This comprehensive guide explores Pub/Sub’s enterprise capabilities. Cloud Pub/Sub Architecture Overview Pub/Sub Architecture: Topics, Subscriptions, and Delivery Guarantees Pub/Sub implements a publish-subscribe pattern where publishers send messages to topics and subscribers receive […]

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Multi-turn Conversation Design: Building Natural Dialogue Systems with LLMs

Introduction: Multi-turn conversations are where LLM applications become truly useful. Users don’t just ask single questions—they refine, follow up, reference previous context, and expect the assistant to remember what was discussed. Building effective multi-turn systems requires careful attention to context management, history compression, turn-taking logic, and graceful handling of topic changes. This guide covers practical […]

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