RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are fast becoming the connective tissue between Large Language Models (LLMs) and real-world business data. But while RAG systems excel at fetching relevant passages from documents, they often stumble when the data isn’t narrative but numerical. In enterprise environments, where structured formats like HR tables, policy records, or financial reports dominate, this mismatch has become a bottleneck. The paper “Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Structured Enterprise and Internal Data” by Chandana Cheerla proposes a much-needed upgrade: a RAG system that treats structured and tabular data as first-class citizens. It doesn’t just flatten tables into linear strings or hope LLMs can reason through semi-garbled inputs. It restructures the entire RAG pipeline to respect and preserve the meaning of tables, rows, and metadata. ...

In the AI race to make large language models both factual and reasoned, two camps have emerged: one focused on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to fight hallucination, the other on long-chain reasoning to mimic logic. But neither wins alone. This week’s survey by Li et al. (2025), Towards Agentic RAG with Deep Reasoning, delivers the most comprehensive synthesis yet of the field’s convergence point: synergized RAG–Reasoning. It’s no longer a question of whether retrieval helps generation or reasoning helps retrieval—but how tightly the two can co-evolve, often under the coordination of autonomous agents. ...

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the go-to technique for grounding large language models (LLMs) in external data. But as anyone building real-world RAG pipelines knows, there’s a growing tension between accuracy and cost. Existing graph-based RAG solutions promise richer semantics than vanilla vector stores, but suffer from two persistent issues: incomplete graphs and retrieval misalignment. The paper “CUE-RAG: Towards Accurate and Cost-Efficient Graph-Based RAG” proposes a structural rethinking. By integrating a multi-partite graph, hybrid extraction, and a query-driven iterative retriever, CUE-RAG achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while cutting indexing costs by up to 72.58% and even outperforming other methods without using any LLM tokens at all. ...

The latest research out of Heriot-Watt University doesn’t just challenge the notion that bigger is better — it quietly dismantles it. In their newly released Athena framework, Nripesh Niketan and Hadj Batatia demonstrate how integrating external APIs into LLM pipelines can outperform even the likes of GPT-4o and LLaMA-Large on real tasks like math and science. And they didn’t just beat them — they lapped them. Why GPT-4 Still Fumbles Math Ask GPT-4o to solve a college-level math problem, and it might hallucinate steps or miss basic arithmetic. The reason? LLMs, even at trillion-parameter scale, are not calculators. They’re probabilistic machines trained on patterns, not deterministic reasoners. ...

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) may seem like a fortress of AI reliability—until you realize the breach happens at the front door, not in the model. Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the backbone of enterprise AI assistants. Yet as more systems integrate RAG pipelines to improve their factuality and domain alignment, a gaping blindspot has emerged—the document ingestion layer. A new paper titled “The Hidden Threat in Plain Text” by Castagnaro et al. warns that attackers don’t need to jailbreak your model or infiltrate your vector store. Instead, they just need to hand you a poisoned DOCX, PDF, or HTML file. And odds are, your RAG system will ingest it—invisibly. ...

The financial industry has always prided itself on cold precision. For decades, quantitative models and spreadsheets dominated boardrooms and trading desks. But that orthodoxy is now under siege. Not from another statistical breakthrough, but from something surprisingly human-like: Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent research shows a dramatic shift in how AI—particularly LLMs like GPT-4 and LLaMA—is being integrated across financial workflows. Far from just summarizing news or answering earnings call questions, LLMs are now organizing entire investment pipelines, fine-tuning themselves on proprietary data, and even collaborating as autonomous financial agents. A recent survey by Mahdavi et al. (2025) categorized over 70 state-of-the-art systems into four distinct architectural frameworks, offering us a lens through which to assess the future of financial AI. ...

Grounded and Confused: Why RAG Systems Still Fail in the Enterprise If you’ve been following the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) hype train, you might believe we’ve cracked enterprise search. Salesforce’s new benchmark—HERB (Heterogeneous Enterprise RAG Benchmark)—throws cold water on that optimism. It exposes how even the most powerful agentic RAG systems, armed with top-tier LLMs, crumble when facing the chaotic, multi-format, and noisy reality of business data. Deep Search ≠ Deep Reasoning Most current RAG benchmarks focus on shallow linkages—documents tied together via entity overlap or topic clusters. HERB rejects this toy model. It defines Deep Search as not just multi-hop reasoning, but searching across unstructured and structured formats, like Slack threads, meeting transcripts, GitHub PRs, and internal URLs. It’s what real enterprise users do daily, and it’s messy. ...

Divide and Conquer: How LLMs Learn to Teach Designing effective lessons for training online tutors is no small feat. It demands pedagogical nuance, clarity, scenario realism, and learner empathy. A recent paper by Lin et al., presented at ECTEL 2025, offers a compelling answer to this challenge: use LLMs, but don’t ask too much at once. Their research reveals that breaking the task of lesson generation into smaller, well-defined parts significantly improves quality, suggesting a new collaborative model for scalable education design. ...

The CoRAG Deal: RAG Without the Privacy Plot Twist The tension is growing: organizations want to co-train AI systems to improve performance, but data privacy concerns make collaboration difficult. Medical institutions, financial firms, and government agencies all sit on valuable question-answer (QA) data — but they can’t just upload it to a shared cloud to train a better model. This is the real challenge holding back Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) from becoming a truly collaborative AI strategy. Not the rise of large context windows. Not LLMs like Gemini 2.5. But the walls between data owners. ...

Gemini 2.5 and the Rise of the 2 Million Token Era In March 2025, Google introduced Gemini 2.5 Pro with a 2 million token context window, marking a major milestone in the capabilities of language models. While this remains an experimental and high-cost frontier, it opens the door to new possibilities. To put this in perspective (approximate values, depending on tokenizer): 📖 The entire King James Bible: ~785,000 tokens 🎭 All of Shakespeare’s plays: ~900,000 tokens 📚 A full college textbook: ~500,000–800,000 tokens This means Gemini 2.5 could, in theory, process multiple entire books or large document repositories in one go—though with substantial compute and memory costs that make practical deployment currently limited. ...