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RAG Checklist (PDF)

RAG Quality Checklist

Debugging Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Your RAG pipeline returns confident, well-formatted, completely wrong answers. This checklist walks through every failure point systematically — from document ingestion to final generation.

What's covered

Inside the checklist

01

Document Ingestion

  • PDF extraction quality
  • Encoding consistency
  • Metadata preservation
  • Document deduplication
02

Chunking Strategy

  • Chunk size optimization
  • Overlap calibration
  • Semantic boundary detection
  • Table and code handling
03

Embedding & Retrieval

  • Embedding model selection
  • Hybrid search (dense + sparse)
  • Re-ranking pipeline
  • Similarity threshold tuning
04

Generation & Validation

  • Context window utilization
  • Source attribution
  • Hallucination detection
  • Answer grounding verification
Next Step

Turn this into a running system

Use this resource to sharpen the engineering decision, then move into the capability path that implements the system with production discipline.

See LangChain & LangGraph Engineering

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