Victor Camargo
Undated design note Conceptual Design

RAG Systems That Hold Up

A conceptual note on PDF retrieval, chunk boundaries, grounding, and failure analysis. It is separate from the source-backed public RAG prototype and does not establish measured reliability.

  • RAG
  • Retrieval
  • Evaluation
  • Grounding

This is a conceptual design note. It does not provide a linked implementation or reproduced evaluation result, and does not establish a deployed PDF retrieval system. It is not the independent public RAG prototype.

Retrieval before generation

PDF workflows can introduce extraction noise, repeated headers, tables, and ambiguous section boundaries. Those issues should be inspected before fluent generation is treated as evidence of a useful answer.

Candidate workflow boundaries

  • Preparation: inspect text extraction and retain document context.
  • Chunking: make boundaries and overlap explicit.
  • Retrieval: distinguish relevant passages from evidence sufficient to answer.
  • Generation: make references traceable without equating a reference ID with semantic support.

Failure analysis

Parsing, chunking, ranking, and answer construction can fail independently. Separate diagnostics would help identify which stage needs attention; no improvement or benchmark result is asserted here.

Evidence needed

A demonstrated system would require source provenance, shareable document fixtures, a labeling protocol, metric definitions, and reproducible retrieval and answer reports. The design vocabulary and reasoning on this page are not substitutes for that evidence.

Related Lab Work

RAG Failure Maps A retrieval-first exploration of where RAG systems break, from weak chunk boundaries and noisy evidence to grounding failures and misleading answer confidence.