RAG End to End

From ingest to grounded answer: the full pipeline, reranking, the failure modes that actually occur, and how to evaluate any of it.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. The Full Pipeline
2. Reranking
3. Where RAG Fails
4. Evaluating RAG

Sources

• Lewis et al. (2020) — Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
• Karpukhin et al. (2020) — Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering
• Reimers & Gurevych (2019) — Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks
• Liu et al. (2023) — Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts