Beyond Naive RAG: Build Smarter Systems with Query Routing and Hybrid Retrieval

This post introduces a four-node architecture for building smarter RAG systems, focusing on query routing, query rewriting, retrieval strategy selection, and minimal-context generation. It advocates for unified hybrid retrieval, combining dense and sparse vectors within a single Milvus collection to simplify operations and improve performance. The post also details stage-by-stage evaluation of RAG pipelines using metrics like F1 score for routing and Recall@K/NDCG for retrieval, enabling faster debugging.