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RAG Assistant

A retrieval-augmented assistant designed to be useful and honest: reproducible indexing, clear guardrails, and conservative behavior when evidence is weak. Public-safe summary.

Core pipeline

Ingestion → embeddings → persistent index → retrieval → response generation

PythonFAISSEmbeddingsGuardrailsStreamlit

Reliability posture

  • Deterministic indexing: reproducible builds of the knowledge index.
  • Retrieval gating: conservative responses when evidence is weak.
  • Provenance: links back to sources where possible.

Approach (high level)

  • Normalize content into predictable chunks.
  • Embed and store vectors with persistence across runs.
  • Retrieve top matches and apply a confidence threshold.
  • Generate responses only when retrieval evidence is sufficient; otherwise refuse or ask for clarification.

What I’d improve next

  • Evaluation harness (retrieval precision/recall + end-to-end QA checks).
  • Citations-by-default and stricter refusal policies for ambiguous prompts.
  • Performance profiling for faster cold start and lower latency.

Note: the portfolio assistant on the main site is deliberately grounded and privacy-safe (local-only knowledge base, no logging).