Course Objective & Scope
Saying that a RAG system's "quality dropped" is not actionable unless you can isolate whether the retriever missed the relevant passage (Recall@k), ranked it too low (MRR/NDCG), or the generator failed to synthesise the evidence faithfully (Faithfulness/Answer Relevance). This course provides a rigorous look at classical Information Retrieval (IR) metrics alongside modern LLM-based generation and citation metrics.
Participants compute reference-based and reference-free metrics in Python, analyse metric correlations and Failure-Mode matrices, and define quantitative release thresholds for their organisation's RAG services.
Who Should Attend?
- Data scientists and AI engineers optimising search and RAG quality through quantitative metrics
- ML and search engineers running A/B and offline benchmarks across embeddings and rerankers
- Technical leads defining quality KPIs and acceptance criteria for AI products
- Prerequisite: basic Python, familiarity with statistics and working knowledge of RAG
Key Takeaways
- Select and compute Recall@k, Precision@k, Hit Rate, MRR, MAP and NDCG@k for retrieval tasks
- Implement the RAG Triad metrics (Context Relevance, Faithfulness/Groundedness, Answer Relevance)
- Distinguish when to use ground-truth reference metrics versus reference-free production metrics
- Measure attribution quality at the claim level using Citation Precision, Citation Recall and F1
- Use bootstrap confidence intervals and paired significance tests when comparing two RAG pipelines
Curriculum
Unranked Retrieval Metrics: Recall@k, Precision@k and Hit Rate
- Document-level, chunk-level and character-span matching definitions
- Computing full-evidence coverage vs partial recall on multi-hop questions
Rank-Aware IR Metrics: MRR, MAP and NDCG@k
- MRR for single-target lookup, MAP for multi-target sets and NDCG@k for graded relevance (0–3)
- Reading `Recall@50` alongside `NDCG@5` to separate retriever recall from reranker precision
The RAG Triad and Context Quality Metrics
- Context Precision, Context Recall and context signal-to-noise ratios
- Claim-decomposition-based Faithfulness and Answer Relevance scoring
Reference-Based Accuracy and Citation Metrics
- Factual Correctness against reference answers, semantic similarity and completeness
- Citation Precision (penalising irrelevant citations) and Citation Recall (flagging unsupported claims)
Statistical Significance, Calibration and Online Proxy Metrics
- Accounting for judge variance with bootstrap confidence intervals and paired significance tests
- Correlating reference-free online metrics with implicit user signals (reformulations, copy actions, feedback)
Lab: Building a RAG Diagnostic Scorecard
- Diagnostic decision matrix combining retrieval and generation metrics
- Defining release quality thresholds (SLOs) for an internal RAG service
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