Course Schedule

Mastering Advanced RAG: 8 Weeks from POC to Production

Week 1
Foundational RAG Architecture & Baselines
  • Introduction to RAG systems
  • The Naive RAG Baseline
  • Understanding retrieval and generation components
  • Setting up your development environment
Week 2
Context Aggregation & Chunking Strategies
  • Chunking & Embedding fundamentals
  • Multimodal Embedding Models
  • Advanced chunking strategies
  • Optimizing context windows
Week 3
Improving-Recall Retrieval: Hybrid Search
  • Dense & Sparse Indexing
  • BM25 and SPLADE algorithms
  • Implementing Hybrid Search
  • Combining multiple retrieval methods
Week 4
Enhancing Precision: Re-ranking
  • Cross-Encoder Optimization
  • Re-ranker architectures
  • Implementing and fine-tuning Cross-Encoder models
  • Metadata filters and query understanding
Week 5
Adding Evals & Proactive Guardrails
  • Offline & Online evaluation frameworks
  • Holistic evaluation approach
  • Faithfulness, Context Recall, and Answer Relevancy metrics
  • PII/Toxicity Guardrails and adversarial prompt testing
Week 6
MLOps: Deploying, Finetuning Performance, Latency & Cost
  • Caching strategies
  • Semantic Caching and query caching
  • Managing latency and inference costs
  • Model selection and optimization
Week 7
Complex Reasoning & Agentic RAG
  • Tool Use & Orchestration Patterns
  • Implementing Tool Use for external data sources
  • Code execution in RAG systems
  • Advanced Agentic RAG patterns: self-reflection, planning, and dynamic function calling
Week 8
Observability and A/B Testing
  • MLOps for RAG systems
  • Packaging and deploying the RAG service
  • Setting up Observability: tracing and logging
  • A/B Testing and experimentation
  • CI/CD for LLM applications