Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a natural-language-processing pipeline introduced by Lewis et al. in 2020 that strengthens a large language model (LLM) with evidence fetched at inference time from an external knowledge base. Instead of relying solely on what a model memorised during training, RAG first retrieves the most relevant passages from a document index and then hands those passages to the LLM as context, grounding the generated answer in verifiable, up-to-date information. The approach reduces hallucination and allows domain-specific or time-sensitive knowledge to be injected without retraining the model.