RAG Evaluation - A Step-by-Step Guide with DeepEval

In my previous Evaluating RAG pipelines post, I introduced two approaches to evaluating RAG pipelines. In this post, I will show you how to implement these two approaches in detail. The implementation will naturally depend on the framework you use. In my case, I’ll be using DeepEval, an open-source evaluation framework. Approach 1: Evaluating Retrieval and Generator separately As a recap, in this approach, you evaluate the retriever and generator of the RAG pipeline separately with their own separate metrics. Read More →

Evaluating RAG pipelines

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) emerged as a dominant framework to feed LLMs the context beyond the scope of its training data and enable LLMs to respond with more grounded answers with less hallucinations based on that context. However, designing an effective RAG pipeline can be challenging. You need to answer certain questions such as: How should you parse and chunk text documents for embedding? What chunk and overlay size to use? Read More →

Gemini on Vertex AI and Google AI now unified with the new Google Gen AI SDK

If you’ve been working with Gemini, you’ve likely encountered the two separate client libraries for Gemini: the Gemini library for Google AI vs. Vertex AI in Google Cloud. Even though the two libraries are quite similar, there are slight differences that make the two libraries non-interchangeable. I usually start my experiments in Google AI and when it is time to switch to Vertex AI on Google Cloud, I couldn’t simply copy and paste my code. Read More →

Control LLM output with LangChain's structured and Pydantic output parsers

In my previous Control LLM output with response type and schema post, I talked about how you can define a JSON response schema and Vertex AI makes sure the output of the Large Language Model (LLM) conforms to that schema. In this post, I show how you can implement a similar response schema using LangChain’s structured output parser with any model. You can further get the output parsed and populated into Python classes automatically with the Pydantic output parser. Read More →

Tracing with Langtrace and Gemini

Large Language Models (LLMs) feel like a totally new technology with totally new problems. It’s true to some extent but at the same time, they also have the same old problems that we had to tackle in traditional technology. For example, how do you figure out which LLM calls are taking too long or have failed? At the bare minimum, you need logging but ideally, you use a full observability platform like OpenTelemetry with logging, tracing, metrics and more. Read More →

Batch prediction in Gemini

LLMs are great in generating content on demand but if left unchecked, you can be left with a large bill at the end of the day. In my Control LLM costs with context caching post, I talked about how to limit costs by using context caching. Batch generation is another technique you can use to save time at a discounted price. What’s batch generation? Batch generation in Gemini allows you to send multiple generative AI requests in batches rather than one by one and get responses asynchronously either in a Cloud Storage bucket or a BigQuery table. Read More →

LLM Guard and Vertex AI

I’ve been focusing on evaluation frameworks lately because I believe that the hardest problem while using LLMs is to make sure they behave properly. Are you getting the right outputs grounded with your data? Are outputs free of harmful or PII data? When you make a change to your RAG pipeline or to your prompts, are outputs getting better or worse? How do you know? You don’t know unless you measure. Read More →

Promptfoo and Vertex AI

In my previous DeepEval and Vertex AI blog post, I talked about how crucial it is to have an evaluation framework in place when working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and introduced DeepEval as one of such evaluation frameworks. Recently, I came across another LLM evaluation and security framework called Promptfoo. In this post, I will introduce Promptfoo, show what it provides for evaluations and security testing, and how it can be used with Vertex AI. Read More →

Firestore for Image Embeddings

In my previous Firestore for Text Embedding and Similarity Search post, I talked about how Firestore and LangChain can help you to store text embeddings and do similarity searches against them. With multimodal embedding models, you can generate embeddings not only for text but for images and video as well. In this post, I will show you how to store image embeddings in Firestore and later use them for similarity search. Read More →

Firestore for Text Embedding and Similarity Search

In my previous Persisting LLM chat history to Firestore post, I showed how to persist chat messages in Firestore for more meaningful and context-aware conversations. Another common requirement in LLM applications is to ground responses in data for more relevant answers. For that, you need embeddings. In this post, I want to talk specifically about text embeddings and how Firestore and LangChain can help you to store text embeddings and do similarity searches against them. Read More →