RAG Playground: A Framework for Systematic Evaluation of Retrieval Strategies and Prompt Engineering in RAG Systems
This provides a systematic evaluation framework for researchers and practitioners working on RAG systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing retrieval and prompting techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems by developing RAG Playground, an open-source framework that compares retrieval approaches and prompt engineering strategies. Their experiments showed that hybrid search methods and structured self-evaluation prompting achieved up to 72.7% pass rate on their multi-metric evaluation framework.
We present RAG Playground, an open-source framework for systematic evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. The framework implements and compares three retrieval approaches: naive vector search, reranking, and hybrid vector-keyword search, combined with ReAct agents using different prompting strategies. We introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework with novel metrics and provide empirical results comparing different language models (Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5) across various retrieval configurations. Our experiments demonstrate significant performance improvements through hybrid search methods and structured self-evaluation prompting, achieving up to 72.7% pass rate on our multi-metric evaluation framework. The results also highlight the importance of prompt engineering in RAG systems, with our custom-prompted agents showing consistent improvements in retrieval accuracy and response quality.