Introducing a new hyper-parameter for RAG: Context Window Utilization

This paper introduces a new hyper-parameter for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems called Context Window Utilization. RAG systems enhance generative models by incorporating relevant information retrieved from external knowledge bases, improving the factual accuracy and contextual relevance of generated responses. The size of the text chunks retrieved and processed is a critical factor influencing RAG performance. This study aims to identify the optimal chunk size that maximizes answer generation quality. Through systematic experimentation, we analyze the effects of varying chunk sizes on the efficiency and effectiveness of RAG frameworks. Our findings reveal that an optimal chunk size balances the trade-off between providing sufficient context and minimizing irrelevant information. These insights are crucial for enhancing the design and implementation of RAG systems, underscoring the importance of selecting an appropriate chunk size to achieve superior performance.

COS-Mix: Cosine Similarity and Distance Fusion for Improved Information Retrieval

This study proposes a novel hybrid retrieval strategy for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that integrates cosine similarity and cosine distance measures to improve retrieval performance, particularly for sparse data. The traditional cosine similarity measure is widely used to capture the similarity between vectors in high-dimensional spaces. However, it has been shown that this measure can yield arbitrary results in certain scenarios. To address this limitation, we incorporate cosine distance measures to provide a complementary perspective by quantifying the dissimilarity between vectors. Our approach is experimented on proprietary data, unlike recent publications that have used open-source datasets. The proposed method demonstrates enhanced retrieval performance and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the semantic relationships between documents or items. This hybrid strategy offers a promising solution for efficiently and accurately retrieving relevant information in knowledge-intensive applications, leveraging techniques such as BM25 (sparse) retrieval , vector (Dense) retrieval, and cosine distance based retrieval to facilitate efficient information retrieval.