Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / The Current State of Agentic Retrieval - Qdrant Roundtable
Transcript
- 0:09What is up everyone? Hope you were jamming to that
- 0:14music as much as I was. I can see the chat is already
- 0:18getting off to a good start. I'm excited because we've got a
- 0:22packed house today to talk all about good old state of agentic
- 0:28retrieval. There's so much that we're going
- 0:31to get into and we've got so many incredible folks here
- 0:35today. But I want to set the scene
- 0:38before we bring out the guests of honor.
- 0:41And I want to talk to you about why this session feels so
- 0:45important. And it is probably why you
- 0:49actually came. You know, there's so many
- 0:52different challenges and changes that we've had with retrieval
- 0:57over the past two years. I have seen such an evolution.
- 1:04And so I thought, why don't we get together some people who
- 1:08have been knee deep in this whole retrieval game to talk to
- 1:12us about what it was like, what did we have back in the day and
- 1:16what do we have now and what are ways that we can optimize it so
- 1:19that we are finding success right now.
- 1:21So without further ado, I'm going to bring on the team from
- 1:26Quadrant. We've got the Devrel folks
- 1:30coming out. First up is my man Dylan.
- 1:36Where are you at it? Hey Dylan, how you doing?
- 1:40We've got Jenny, we've got Eva, Neil and Andre.
- 1:47I think this is the most people that we've ever had on a round
- 1:51table. So let's just kick it off, start
- 1:56strong with some hard hitting questions.
- 2:00I'm going to ask what has changed in the last two years?
- 2:06I I've seen so much. What do we need to focus on?
- 2:11Yeah, sure. Yeah, I can take that.
- 2:14Hi everyone, Neil here. Yeah, thanks for joining the
- 2:17session and thanks for the intro.
- 2:19Demetrios. There's so much happening in
- 2:23Retrieval and Surge. I, before I joined Quadrant, I
- 2:28didn't fully appreciate the, the field of search.
- 2:30And we kind of just expect search to work.
- 2:34And we definitely notice when search doesn't work well and we
- 2:38notice it through just getting like terrible results and, or it
- 2:44takes a long time to get results.
- 2:45We can't find what we're looking for.
- 2:48And the more data that we capture and from the real world,
- 2:52the more we need to get that information, get, get the data,
- 2:56the right data we need, get the information out of our, the data
- 2:59we're storing. So what the back to the
- 3:01question, what's changed? One of the biggest things has
- 3:04changed is agents and the topic of today's round table agents, a
- 3:10lot of them don't really search well, I would say, in my
- 3:16opinion, there's a lot of they, they kind of search like a, like
- 3:22a, a beginner would just search by just like kind of throwing a
- 3:26lot of things into the, into the hat and just like trying to like
- 3:31pull, pull, pull results. And they go through lots of
- 3:34turns and they burn a lot of tokens and they try to find this
- 3:39context, but they're not using all the tools available for
- 3:42search and this. And if you don't have the right
- 3:44context in your AI, that's going to really make your AI less
- 3:48efficient, less effective. It's going to prevent you from
- 3:52reaching your goals. So agents and, and one of the
- 3:56things that agents are doing that's also interesting is like
- 3:59a human might search like once or twice a minute or so.
- 4:02Agents are searching thousands of times per minute.
- 4:05So they're just going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom hitting
- 4:07it. And they're not able to evaluate
- 4:10those search results. So same way human can, because
- 4:14humans have a lot of more judgement that they can apply.
- 4:17So yeah, I'll stop there. But those are those are some
- 4:20things that have really changed. Dude, you're preaching to the
- 4:23choir on the different ways that agents search and then the ways
- 4:27that they interpret that data. And so I, I have some questions
- 4:32here about like, hey, now that we've got agents and these
- 4:36agents are figuring things out, they're kind of, we've all seen
- 4:40it. They will stumble through
- 4:42different problem statements where they'll try and figure it
- 4:46out and they don't necessarily go about it the most efficient
- 4:51way possible. I wonder if you all have found
- 4:56tricks on nudging the agents to be like, Oh, yeah, by the way,
- 5:02like there's obviously the go look in that file trick, but
- 5:07there potentially could be plenty more that you've seen.
- 5:10Because this at the end of the day, is a search and retrieval
- 5:14problem. And the faster that you can get
- 5:17those agents, that knowledge, the faster they can hopefully do
- 5:21what you've asked them to do. Yeah, I'm I'm actually going to
- 5:26take jump in here again, but I'm going to pass the Dylan on this.
- 5:28So Dylan, get ready. So just to set like a little
- 5:34more context there is, you know, it's not just the efficiency,
- 5:39but it's the effectiveness of search like finding the most
- 5:42relevant response, relevant results.
- 5:45And I think that it goes into evaluation.
- 5:49How do you evaluate that the results are good enough to use?
- 5:54Should you try again? Should you change your query?
- 5:57And if you should try again, when do you stop?
- 6:01When like how how long does the agent go before it stops?
- 6:05What tools can it use available to it?
- 6:08And Dylan's actually done self correcting agent loops that he
- 6:14can talk a little bit about. So I'm going to hand to you to
- 6:16talk a little bit about what you found.
- 6:19Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
- 6:21So my first points that I'm going to talk about is that
- 6:25Neil, you just mentioned evaluations and I feel like a
- 6:29lot of people are familiar with like the general, you know,
- 6:33evaluation frameworks and evals that you can run on an agent.
- 6:38But also in the information retrieval space, we have a lot
- 6:42of our own like evals and metrics like NDCJMR that are
- 6:46like really relevant for, you know, search pipelines and that
- 6:51that we use extensively. But going into your what, what
- 6:56you mentioned about like self evaluating agents.
- 6:59So, you know, there's a lot of techniques for for that.
- 7:03You know, the most obvious one is to spin up like a small agent
- 7:07and say, hey, was that result relevance?
- 7:10Did it contain, you know, all the information that the user
- 7:14was looking for? But the problem here is that,
- 7:17you know, you add another like LLM roundtrip so that it is
- 7:21extra latency, extra cost, Ian, and it makes your pipeline
- 7:25slower, more complex. And so something that we've been
- 7:29working on was computing statistical signals that, you
- 7:36know, very cheap signals based on the, the results.
- 7:41And so, so for example, you know, when when you retrieve,
- 7:45you know, using like dense or sparse embeddings, basic
- 7:48basically you get like a score as a result.
- 7:53So for like dense embeddings, it is between, you know, like 0 and
- 7:57one which one being like the most confidence.
- 7:59And you know, you return like the top K results, so the top
- 8:03five or the top ten. And basically you can do some
- 8:08statistic based on like the spread of those scores or how
- 8:14the difference between the the top one and the top second
- 8:17results. And basically from here, try to
- 8:21create a programmatic, you know, signals that will that that will
- 8:28be able to tell you if the quality of your retrieval was
- 8:32good or not without virtually any adding any compute to your
- 8:37pipeline. And then once you you have that
- 8:40that signals that signal that tells you, you know, the the
- 8:43retrieval was good or not, then you can basically route your
- 8:48retrieval agents to like different paths.
- 8:51And you can choose, for example, to do like more expensive
- 8:55retrieval method, like a cross encoder or late interaction
- 8:58model. Or if the result was not good
- 9:01enough or not like not good at all at all.
- 9:05It's like, you know, there was like a huge divergent in in
- 9:08between like all the scores that you retrieved.
- 9:10This is when you can invoke an additional LLM.
- 9:14So the in order testings, this was like really a good way to
- 9:19tell apart like good from bad retrieval in a way that is
- 9:22really cheap and allows you to spend more money only only when
- 9:27it was necessary. And then we also have some
- 9:34something on that topic on skills.
- 9:36So I'll pass it over to Jenny. I think it's super funny.
- 9:40We're working like, you know, actually a multi agent chain out
- 9:44there because we're passing tasks to each other and
- 9:48Demetrius, you're the evaluator of how the pipeline is going,
- 9:51right? So we're just emulating search
- 9:55and informational retrieval from our heads in the going.
- 9:58And yeah, like the little addition as I think everybody
- 10:01knows about the genetic skills also, right?
- 10:05So they're also applicable in search.
- 10:07The problem is agents need to know how to use search as humans
- 10:13actually sometimes also do it bad because they also don't know
- 10:16how to search properly for something, but they do it
- 10:18differently. With agents.
- 10:21There is a good solution of teach them how to approach it is
- 10:24to show them skills. For example, we designed some
- 10:29bucket of search engineer skills which we're trying to maintain
- 10:34in quadrant which explained our agent which approaches our
- 10:39vector search engine on what to use and how to combine it to get
- 10:44different outcomes. For example, if you have a
- 10:48problem that your search doesn't show for you as an agent,
- 10:52relevant results at the top and you feel like there is something
- 10:55more to it, then there is a specific markdown part of the
- 10:59skill which tells, Hey, you should do this, this, this with
- 11:02our, with our APIs, I think we can share the link later.
- 11:08Or I could try to share the screen, but I'm so afraid to
- 11:11share. You know, it's the hardest
- 11:13thing. That's why like I'm senior
- 11:15developer relations, but I never managed to share a screen
- 11:18without sharing my private chats.
- 11:20So let's see, worst case we're just dumping the link and
- 11:23showing how the skill evolvement for the search pipelines is also
- 11:28helping our agents to use our search infrastructure properly.
- 11:34Classic. OK, I've got some follow up
- 11:36questions and there are some awesome questions that are
- 11:40coming through in the chat, but ever I wanted to give you some
- 11:44time in case there's anything you wanted to tag on here.
- 11:50Sure. So Jenny mentioned a little bit
- 11:52of how we can teach agents how to know search.
- 11:57So essentially when we added the agents, we moved from a very
- 12:03static system of RAG to something much more dynamic.
- 12:06But actually the search primitives that are underlying
- 12:10remain the same. So one research paper that came
- 12:13quite recently last month that I found really interesting on the
- 12:17topic is called Sera, which is the Super intelligence retrieval
- 12:22agent. And the whole idea there is to
- 12:27achieving super intelligence, which is when the multi round
- 12:30search is compressed into a single corpus retrieval.
- 12:34So we've essentially avoided the latency that Dylan was talking
- 12:40about the the latency lags. And what they've done that was
- 12:45quite relevant to to our today's topic is they figured out how to
- 12:49use the LLM to enrich the documents.
- 12:52So have this iterative loop whenever the search vocabulary
- 12:58was missing. So they looked at the queries
- 13:00that were generated, evaluated what queries that were missing,
- 13:04and essentially predicted omitted vocabulary and added to
- 13:09it before they passed it on to more traditional search
- 13:13paradigms like BM25. OK.
- 13:17There's a lot to unpack with all three of you saying this stuff
- 13:22because basically, let me just say what I caught real fast and
- 13:28then you can correct me if I'm wrong there.
- 13:32Dylan, You're talking about different ways that you can use
- 13:36statistics to leverage and get better results with the
- 13:41retrieval and with the agents recognizing what to grab and
- 13:45what to retrieve and what is used.
- 13:53Tell me what? Yeah, tell me what?
- 13:55Sorry, yeah. So basically it was like a cheap
- 13:57way to get early signs into bad or good retrieval without, you
- 14:03know, adding any latency or cost to your pipeline and then routes
- 14:08based on those signals. All right.
- 14:12Then from there, Jenny, you mentioned using skills and how
- 14:18you all at Quadrant have created a bunch of skills.
- 14:21Are those open source? I didn't catch that one.
- 14:22That was the quick. Everything that we do,
- 14:26everything ish that we do is open source.
- 14:29So, yeah, obviously. Drop that into the chat here and
- 14:34I can relay it to the chat or put it in wherever, whatever
- 14:40chat you want. But we definitely I want to see
- 14:42all of those skills. And lastly, Eva, you were saying
- 14:46that there is a paper on the Super intelligent retrieval
- 14:51agents and the way that they're able to leverage and I didn't
- 14:58catch now. Now my memory is starting to
- 14:59fade trying to hold all these things in my hand head.
- 15:03The Super intelligent retrieval agents were doing what now?
- 15:08So it's just a framework of how do we know that we've build an
- 15:11agent that essentially does successful retrieval?
- 15:17Incredible. OK, cool.
- 15:18So before I hit some of these questions from the chat and and
- 15:25I'm just like looking at the chat about big question that's
- 15:29coming up is like, hey, what about ground truth?
- 15:32How do we figure that out? What is cause to know if the
- 15:36retrieval is correct, right? We also need to know what the
- 15:40the actual thing is, the ground truth that we're looking for.
- 15:44Does anyone have opinions there? I see some things taken I.
- 15:54Would say, I would say a proper bunch and each of us has like I
- 16:01would say different sides of it. And also about what ground truth
- 16:05is, I think our problem is that we got the agentic systems and
- 16:12we got super excited and we're like, are they solving search
- 16:15fully? But the problem is that
- 16:17evaluations weren't fully solved before with the classical
- 16:20search. And now with agentic search, it
- 16:22gets even more tricky because you're like, is the ground truth
- 16:26that the agent successfully fulfilled the whole task and
- 16:29arrived to the right point? Or is there is a ground truth on
- 16:33the age point of the iteration of what it does in the process
- 16:38and there are several approaches to it.
- 16:40There is ground truth in retrieval as probably people
- 16:44know can be created from some golden data sets per SE.
- 16:50So some from the data that you already have and you know that
- 16:55this question should get this answer from your data set.
- 17:00Usually in production it's not so easy to get it, but LLMS got
- 17:05pretty good at helping to generate the synthetical data
- 17:09sets with golden truth. The one tip and opinion that I
- 17:13have as the person who previously worked in
- 17:15crowdsourcing as a devil of crowdsourcing approach, so where
- 17:19the humans were gathering these data sets is that don't
- 17:23immediately expect dumping your protectional data to LLM that it
- 17:28will create your ideal golden set evaluation.
- 17:31And creating the golden truth still is the work where you need
- 17:35to be in the dialogue like you're in the dialogue
- 17:38developing a cold project. So the relevance notion, the
- 17:42ground truth notion still comes from you as a domain expert and
- 17:46that can be like LLM could be used as a tool to develop the
- 17:51ground truth data set that you can then inject in your
- 17:55evaluations. But when it comes, I know I have
- 17:59too much to say 1 little thing, one little 11 little thing.
- 18:03But when it comes to the whole thing as the whole pipeline to
- 18:08be successful for you like solving the task, there are very
- 18:14different approaches on how to teach model to do the correct
- 18:18search trajectories which goes a little bit in more into
- 18:22reinforcement learning domain. And I feel like there is a lot
- 18:25of emerging there teaching agents to do the right decisions
- 18:29in search. And there are the ground truth
- 18:32is the result being correct given the task, given the search
- 18:38task, the search input. Maybe your audience knows Ralph
- 18:42root loops. So they're also to some extent
- 18:44applicable to the search. But Dylan here is coming from a
- 18:50rise and he was doing evaluations as as the bread and
- 18:54butter so. So, Dylan, this dovetails nicely
- 19:00into one of the questions that's in the chat.
- 19:05Someone was asking about how teams are versioning and
- 19:10evaluating retrieval pipelines in production.
- 19:14Yeah, absolutely. So you know, something that I
- 19:19want to preface for preface with first is that we are a vector
- 19:24search engine. So you know, we only provide
- 19:27only one of the cogs in the machine.
- 19:31And you know, this is really by purpose.
- 19:34We don't want to be selling like or providing like a retrieval
- 19:38agent. We really want to stay very
- 19:41close to the metal and provide like the, the best retrieval
- 19:45engine possible. But when it comes to those kinds
- 19:48of like evaluations and versioning, I will usually
- 19:53suggest to use like an evaluation framework or
- 19:56platform. Of course, you know, I come from
- 19:59our IAIS, so I'm, I'm, I might, my opinion might be biased
- 20:03there, but there's a bunch of free evaluation tooling that can
- 20:09help you do that that versioning there.
- 20:15Awesome. And I think Andre, you had some
- 20:19other thoughts about this too. Where are you?
- 20:23I got to change the view to see. There he is.
- 20:26There we go. Yeah, Andre's been doing.
- 20:29Space on the screen. So I, I would like to say that
- 20:34from my experience, what can also help if we jump back for
- 20:38the, for the golden set is when you kinda have some kind of
- 20:43assumptions based on the human, on some human manual labor work.
- 20:49What can be good for your golden set so that the LLM has some
- 20:54kind of criterias that it can evaluate about.
- 20:57And I would like to say that it's like an iterative process
- 21:00in which you try to improve your LLM as a judge.
- 21:05Yeah, time from time so that the golden set that it is creating
- 21:08and the evaluation in general becomes better.
- 21:11So it's a long process. It's iterative process that just
- 21:16becomes better as you train it more, yeah.
- 21:21Awesome. Well, we've got more questions
- 21:25in the chat. I see the let me just let me
- 21:29just grab this. So Eva missing search terms are
- 21:35Grafton dynamically. How does that handle prompt
- 21:38injection shenanigans, if at all?
- 21:44This is a good question so in the paper and feel free to share
- 21:49the link in the chat. Hopefully you have it.
- 21:52I I haven't found the cybersecurity aspect of it, but
- 21:56I think this would be like a really nice segue to agentic
- 22:02harnesses. And as you design your system,
- 22:07retrieval will not solve everything.
- 22:10You still need to add tools onto your agent that would make it
- 22:14more secure. But I think this is a really
- 22:17important design principle to to consider because prompt
- 22:21injection is definitely a very serious serious threats.
- 22:26And I think especially recently we had open claw and or miss an
- 22:32agent that came out. And with open claw there was a
- 22:35lot of hype, but also we saw when we did not properly sandbox
- 22:40it that it was able to just go completely wild and access all
- 22:44of our data. So yeah, I think that is not
- 22:48specifically mentioned in that paper, but consideration that
- 22:52every single good agentic retrieval system should have,
- 22:56yes. So let me continue with a few
- 23:01more questions from the chat and then we will go on to the next
- 23:05topic that I had in my notes. There is my biggest pain point
- 23:10from John is he's saying biggest pain point I've had with rag
- 23:15stacks is defining edge and entities dynamically with LLM
- 23:21analysts. Can you speak to different
- 23:24approaches to that problem? And I'll just throw that to the
- 23:28crowd. Anybody have strong thoughts?
- 23:35I agree because I've heard it a lot on the conferences, but I
- 23:38believe it's more of the graph ontology construction problem.
- 23:45And we as the vector search engine don't do the ontology in
- 23:50construction. We usually combine because in
- 23:54many, many domains it's a very good complementary thing.
- 23:57For example, in memory of agents, it makes sense to mix
- 24:01both graph and vector search. That's how many agentic memory
- 24:06providers do, for example, Cogni.
- 24:10But I've heard that list from practitioners on the conferences
- 24:15and don't quote on me. I would ask Neo 4 J guys on
- 24:18that, that if you atomize the task of ontology instruction in
- 24:24the sense you don't try to build the whole ontology of the
- 24:29domain, but you do it bit by bit in the more atomized setting
- 24:35that actually performs much better, like the outcome is much
- 24:39better. But I also know that Andrey
- 24:43before worked with ontology. So maybe you have like a little
- 24:47point of view on that. Yeah.
- 24:52So can you repeat the question again so that I I have the
- 24:57latest? The biggest pain point I've had
- 25:00with Rag stacks is defining edge and entities dynamically with
- 25:05LLM and analysis. Do you have any approaches on
- 25:10that? Oh, I would say that, yeah, the
- 25:16problem is that these are kind as, as Jane, you already said,
- 25:21some kind of ontologies that you try to provide to the vector
- 25:25search and to the semantics. So you you you kinda try to put
- 25:30the explicit semantics into the vector semantics.
- 25:33And I think these are laying down two different layers.
- 25:39Yeah, 1 is application layer and another one is, is more of
- 25:45implementation right of the technology.
- 25:48So I would say right now what you can do is basically just
- 25:56like the the current state of art we can say is that there are
- 26:00lots of GitHub profiles and GitHub projects that are trying
- 26:08to combine new 4G approach here with explicit entities and also
- 26:15nodes with something that is vector based.
- 26:19And there are some successes there because or what does the
- 26:26graph tell you? It can tell you the
- 26:28relationship, can tell you the dependencies and in some sense
- 26:32it can give you additional context that semantics not
- 26:35always can get, you know, because like you can have
- 26:38something that is 2000 from 2001 and something from 2014 and you
- 26:45want something specifically that is from 2014 to be more aligned
- 26:51on top. You can you can fix it of
- 26:54course, with some custom, some custom scoring, some custom
- 27:01relevance metrics that you provide by yourself.
- 27:04Maybe again, it depends on the domain, but I would say there
- 27:09are these approaches that they basically try to combine vector
- 27:13and graph in one stack. Yeah.
- 27:17Or you can try to encode in some way information into the red.
- 27:23But yeah, it's quite hard, yeah. Awesome.
- 27:27Well, let's keep it cruising because I want to get into
- 27:30memory and it feels like that is a perfect segue into memory and
- 27:36how folks are approaching this, how you all have seen the best
- 27:41in the business do it. And especially like I know there
- 27:44is a lot of talk about long term memory and the architectures
- 27:50that you have for those. And also if they are that
- 27:53valuable because sometimes I will not necessarily want
- 27:59something to be remembered, but it gets remembered.
- 28:01And then for every single question that I'm asking my
- 28:06agent, and I'll give you a concrete example of this, I
- 28:09told, I told the chatbot that I was vegetarian.
- 28:15And now for things that have nothing to do with food, it
- 28:18says, well, given your vegan lifestyle.
- 28:22And I'm like, I asked you a question about my taxes.
- 28:25Get the fuck out of here. Why would you need to reference
- 28:29my vegan lifestyle? So anyway, that's just a little
- 28:32bit of a tangent. Maybe we can talk long term
- 28:34memory or we can also. I'm going to throw different
- 28:37things out there like episodic memory.
- 28:39Do you want to go event based verse?
- 28:41Semantic memory? How do you do the factual verse
- 28:44conceptual? Who wants to take this one?
- 28:47I'll throw it. Throw it up there and let
- 28:49anybody rise to the challenge. Let me try to jump in because I
- 28:59relate a lot to this part about the vegan taxes.
- 29:03I think it's the classical, you know, LLMS, like please don't
- 29:07think about elephants. I think Dylan taught me that.
- 29:10And then immediately whatever you do, it's going to recall
- 29:13this elephants. That's why it's also remember
- 29:15when you do anything around memory is also to think about
- 29:19forgetting as a conception. But it's a very hard one, an
- 29:22interesting one. And there are like several tool
- 29:24links on how to do that. So basically whatever I wanted
- 29:29to say is very quick is that I think people out there probably
- 29:34tried Hermes or open claw agents because who didn't?
- 29:40It was my first Wow effect, to be honest.
- 29:43And we recently recently been like day before yesterday,
- 29:48actually, it's, you know, hype driven development a little bit
- 29:52released a plug in which allows to store episodic and semantic
- 29:55memory of a Hermes agent in quadrant.
- 30:00And I don't have a super sick demo or anything, but I chat
- 30:05with my RMS agent a little bit and some of the memories of me
- 30:09trying to prepare for this envelopes meetups got actually
- 30:12started in my quadrant classer. I can show it but before also
- 30:16like a quick note in case somebody just this not very well
- 30:20versed with the concept of different memories.
- 30:23There is a working one which is the context window.
- 30:25The chat you're in there is semantic or factual memory.
- 30:30It's the one that something is true about you.
- 30:32For example, that the Metris is vegan and likes to do taxes.
- 30:36Do you? No, OK, doesn't like to do taxes
- 30:39then happens to all of us. Then there is a procedure,
- 30:44procedural one. It's actually more like skills.
- 30:47So what to do in order to achieve something.
- 30:50And the fourth one would be episodic one.
- 30:53This perfect thing for the vector search.
- 30:56Actually, it's all the recalls of what you have discussed in
- 30:59the past and that it could help your agent to understand how to
- 31:05deal with the stuff better considering all its private
- 31:08previous knowledge. So I wired my Army's agent to my
- 31:15cordon cluster specifically for that to show you.
- 31:20Let me try to demonstrate it. It's going to be a very lame
- 31:23demo, but we have a cooler 1 so don't get don't get discouraged.
- 31:29This is nice because people were asking for demos in the chat,
- 31:33and so I think I just asked in our background chat if anybody
- 31:38else has one. Dylan, you have one too, huh?
- 31:41That we can throw later on. All right, cool.
- 31:44Yeah, I'll follow up with them as well.
- 31:47OK, I'm I'm going to tell you, you're going to love Dylan's one
- 31:50and you're going to maybe like mine.
- 31:53What am I currently showing? Is it my Slack or is it like UI
- 31:58of collections in quadrant? Hold on, I got to check it out.
- 32:03I see this no us so yeah, quadrant you're.
- 32:09Good. I'm good.
- 32:11OK. So as you see, this is a very
- 32:14impressive memory of 37 points approximately in quadrant.
- 32:18But basically what happens, all of the facts that I have in the
- 32:23conversation with my Hermes agent, which I'm not going to
- 32:26obviously share because I ask embarrassing questions all the
- 32:29time, that's why I wipe the memory.
- 32:32So all the facts and all the turns in the conversations are
- 32:38saved with the different metadata of the sessions that
- 32:42they happened in. And that will help agent recall
- 32:46some similar information. For example.
- 32:48I'm a big fan of this GE Chepa approach which Jan Dikun is
- 32:53recently saying that it's the next big thing for embeddings.
- 32:56So agent can find similar memories.
- 32:59You can see that with dense vector search for example about
- 33:02this method you will be able to find some other memories which
- 33:06are kinda about the same fact. And this plug in you can also
- 33:12visualize kinda the memories. There is not so much to see yet
- 33:18because there is not too much memories.
- 33:21But we can see that for example with the semantical embeddings,
- 33:25there are similar memories about me preparing some smart facts
- 33:29about the Transformers attention window will being very important
- 33:33for context windows being very important for vector search.
- 33:36And that's why vector search now won't be dead as much as RAC can
- 33:41become dead at some point. And if I would start chatting
- 33:47now with my Hermes agent, for example, that I will add the
- 33:53fact that well that Demetrius is vegan.
- 33:58So now all of my inputs are also going to be polluted about.
- 34:02This. No, it was the other one that
- 34:04was true. I like doing taxes.
- 34:07And Demetrius likes to do. I'm not showing you my telegram
- 34:13where I'm chatting with Ernies, but that's what's happening.
- 34:16So technically, if the double goals are nice to me, we should
- 34:21see that the points are going to get updated at some point.
- 34:25But if they are not, the demo gods are just not nice to me and
- 34:28you will see the nicer demo. We can come back.
- 34:31We can come back because I think my RMS agent obviously decided
- 34:35to sleep in the moment I decided to demonstrate something.
- 34:38But the general conception is that basically you have your
- 34:43memory bank because information about you that you do now will
- 34:48grow and grow and grow. And some point MD files won't be
- 34:52enough to recall all of the information.
- 34:54And then you need some, well index which will organize this
- 34:58memories, let them forget and let them be surfaced in the
- 35:03right moments. And I think this is very
- 35:05important. Where are we going?
- 35:06Because the information, as Neil said at the very beginning,
- 35:09grows and grows and grows. Demo gods absolutely obliterated
- 35:13me. But I know that Dylan has a very
- 35:16cool 1 so everybody can forget this.
- 35:20And oh, go ahead, sorry, we finished it.
- 35:24I. Think we've got, well, I wanted
- 35:28to talk for a minute about forgetting and that whole thing
- 35:34because I know that can be very difficult.
- 35:35And there's also a question in the chat that I want to bring up
- 35:39about like vector databases still being the preferred choice
- 35:43for long term memory. So maybe Eva, can you talk
- 35:47forgetting real fast? And then if you have any
- 35:49thoughts about vector databases, I can imagine I know which way
- 35:53you're going to follow on that one.
- 35:55But let's let's go. Hopefully you won't forget that
- 35:59one. So yeah, I mean, Jenny showed
- 36:04what's like the benefit of of memory and dealing of all of
- 36:09that. But I think memory is also
- 36:12polluting a lot our context window.
- 36:14So forgetting is actually a massive and really interesting
- 36:18topic of how do we even decide. Being vegetarian might not be
- 36:23relevant when you fill your taxes, but on your next session
- 36:27you might be trying to optimize your diet and that information
- 36:31will be very important. So this is the world of decay
- 36:37functions and also relevance feedback.
- 36:39So agents have this nice thing that you can iteratively tell
- 36:46them what exactly in that particular search query is
- 36:51relevant and you can boost that. So this is the ability where I
- 36:55think vector search actually really shines because you can
- 36:59figure out for that particular session, what information should
- 37:03I include in my decay function and just forget.
- 37:06And that can be based on temporary time stamp or that
- 37:09could be filtered by keywords, etc.
- 37:14And then there's another thing, which is some memories actually
- 37:18overtime that you're putting into the sections into our
- 37:22sessions, my duplicates. So that's another really
- 37:26important thing is in order not to completely jam packed your
- 37:30context window and actually get out of your engine agent what
- 37:34you want, you can use vector search to de duplicate those
- 37:38memories. So we have very clean context
- 37:41window and next time you're filing your taxes, it's just
- 37:44that and you can boost it and decay based on certain filters
- 37:49and scores the information that's not relevant for the
- 37:52session. That's awesome, Neil.
- 37:56I feel like you had some things to say.
- 37:59Yeah, I haven't. Talked to you in a while.
- 38:01Yeah, I don't have anything insightful.
- 38:04I just wanted to hand over to Dylan with a little bit of
- 38:09context. We're talking about memory and
- 38:12forgetting and search. And we, we weren't planning on
- 38:17showing this demo on, but since there were requests for demos,
- 38:21we'll go ahead and show it. This is a demo demo.
- 38:24Dylan's gonna show on actually on device search.
- 38:28And so when we think about memory and forgetting an AI,
- 38:30like physical AI is becoming a really interesting area and how
- 38:35agents and AI on physical devices need to be able to
- 38:39remember certain contexts, be able to use that context, and
- 38:44then how humans can interact with that.
- 38:46There's also something really cool that Dylan can can show.
- 38:50So yeah, Dylan handing over to you.
- 38:53Absolutely. Thank you.
- 38:54And yeah, so you know, we're kind of like steering away from
- 38:58like the agency topic. But this is the good thing about
- 39:01vector search is that it's not only limited to to rag and
- 39:05Agentic. And so we're today we're so I'm
- 39:08going to show showcase your project that I built for a
- 39:11robotic use case. So can you guys see my screen?
- 39:16OK. Not yet Hold.
- 39:20On Let me do my Job, there we go.
- 39:23All right, perfect. So this is like just like the
- 39:27the GitHub project. It is completely public and free
- 39:31and open source. So if you guys want you to run
- 39:33this yourself, so today we're going to run it on like a
- 39:36prerecorded video, but it works with like any, any kind of
- 39:40input. You can connect your your camera
- 39:42and it will stop working live. Can you make it a little bigger?
- 39:47Yes, absolutely. There we go.
- 39:51Now we're getting there. All right, so basically we're
- 39:55starting with zero that agents knows nothing about the world.
- 39:59It doesn't have like a database of like labels of what items
- 40:03looks like, of what is a chair, what is the floor lamp, what is
- 40:06a coffee table. And so we have like three kinds
- 40:09of models that run in parallel. So it's all all running on
- 40:12device, it's all running locally.
- 40:16You know, if I turn off my network right now, you would
- 40:17lose me, but I would not lose that product.
- 40:21And so basically what what's happening here is that we have
- 40:24first a an image recognition, an object recognition model that is
- 40:29called yellow, and then a second model that is an image to text
- 40:34model. And this model basically creates
- 40:36a label and also a description for each item that it sees.
- 40:42And then what we can do is that basically we can do semantic
- 40:46search on every item that the robot has seen before.
- 40:52And so, you know, it started with like a completely clean
- 40:56memory when I, you know, when I opened up that that app, that
- 40:59robot has never seen anything before.
- 41:02And now it's able to recognize every single objects and
- 41:06memorize them and then recall when and where is so those
- 41:10objects. So, you know, the applications
- 41:12for robotics are pretty pretty much endless.
- 41:17And here basically you can so you know, this graph is a 2D
- 41:22representation of the actual embedding space.
- 41:25And so you can see the, the robot, the robot's brain being
- 41:30built in real time and you can see all the memory of basically
- 41:34all the concepts that are close together.
- 41:37So you see like all the hallways are grouped together here.
- 41:40We can see like there's like the dining table and chairs that is
- 41:44grouped together here. You know, we can see that we, we
- 41:47went into the bathroom so that those memories are pretty far
- 41:51away in the embedding space. And then you can really recall,
- 41:56you know, everything that you has that you have seen before
- 42:00and the the robot will be basically to able to recall
- 42:05every single mirror that he has seen.
- 42:08And yeah. And so you know, this is just
- 42:10to, so you know, we're, we're not selling embedded models,
- 42:15we're not selling vision models. We're really just that memory
- 42:20layer. We're just.
- 42:21We have a model that creates embeddings based on those image
- 42:25and text, and we allow for very quick search and recall on those
- 42:31memories. That's so awesome.
- 42:36Whose house is that? Is that your house?
- 42:39Oh, I wish. I was going to say that you
- 42:44negotiated a pretty good salary if that is your house.
- 42:48No, that that was just, you know, like on online tour from
- 42:51like a leasing agent or a realtor.
- 42:54Oh that's awesome. That is so cool.
- 42:56The fact that it's on device too with these the small models is
- 43:01really impressive. Yep.
- 43:03So, so you know, this was like a way to demo like Quadrant Edge,
- 43:08which is the embedded version of quadrants and this version can
- 43:13run on a Raspberry Pi. I'm not even like the top of the
- 43:15line US1. I have one form like five years
- 43:18ago that runs it just fine. Awesome.
- 43:23Now there was a question that I said in the chat I was going to
- 43:28ask and I totally skipped over it.
- 43:30I told folks so we're I want to get to it.
- 43:34It's asking about vector databases still being the
- 43:38preferred choice for long term memory or our knowledge graphs
- 43:42and structured memory stores gaining traction.
- 43:50I, I would say from what I'm saying, it's not an either orbit
- 43:57of both. We're, we're they, they both
- 44:01have their uses in different contexts.
- 44:05But you know, like dense, dense vectors, dense embeddings are
- 44:10going to give you a lot of like semantic meaning, but like
- 44:13vector stores are not really the best for like relationships
- 44:17between those different entities.
- 44:21And so using like we, we have a great partnership with Neo 4J
- 44:27and there's a video I put in the private chat.
- 44:30Maybe you can share Demetrios, but like graph rag and using
- 44:33knowledge graphs with vector stores together can make a
- 44:37really good substrate for memory overall.
- 44:40And just to kind of like shout out a couple other companies
- 44:44doing this is like Cogney and Men 0.
- 44:49Cogney has they use both like transactional data or well, they
- 44:56use like transactional data, they use vector data stores,
- 45:00then they use knowledge graphs all together.
- 45:02So you can check those out too. Nice.
- 45:08A question came through about the demo and it was mainly about
- 45:15how detailed all of these captions are.
- 45:17Like are you getting things down to the level of types of
- 45:21material and style or is it just coffee table?
- 45:29For Dylan. Sorry, can you repeat that
- 45:32question? You were looking at the chat
- 45:34huh? You were you were busy or you
- 45:36were re watching the demo thinking damn this is a really
- 45:39good product that I made How? How?
- 45:44How do you know me so well? That's well played.
- 45:48So, so basically how much detail do you get from those different
- 45:55captions or whatever it's being labeled?
- 45:59Is it going down to the like hey this is a postmodern coffee
- 46:04table made out of glass or is it just like coffee table?
- 46:08Yeah. So it really depends on like you
- 46:12know, the image to text model that you you want to use.
- 46:17So I use SIGLIP 2, if I remember correctly, which is a very like,
- 46:23you know, basic like open source model that can that can run on
- 46:27your on your device. And so that model will usual.
- 46:30And I did not try to ask for much in depth definition.
- 46:36You know, I was just looking for coffee table table here.
- 46:39So maybe that model has the capability to have a more in
- 46:42depth definition. But if not this one, I'm sure
- 46:46that, you know, image to text models are very good these days.
- 46:50And if you want a really like detailed explain the issue of or
- 46:55like description of the object, I'm sure this is something that
- 46:58can be done. Nice.
- 47:02So we've got, I want to bring us back a little bit to the topic
- 47:09du jour, which is a genetic retrieval.
- 47:13We were going hard on that and the chat was loving it.
- 47:17And then we also, the chat was asking for some demos and we got
- 47:20some cool stuff. But there's a lot that we can
- 47:25talk about still with agentic retrieval.
- 47:28And so maybe we can veer in that direction.
- 47:34Neil, I feel like you have some things you wanted to say.
- 47:39Yeah, sure. I can.
- 47:41You know, we got like roughly 10 minutes left.
- 47:44And so as we center back on agentic retrieval, some general
- 47:52things that I think the audience should, you know, some ground
- 47:56setting, ground levelling things that I think the audience should
- 47:58all be aware of with vector search is that even whether it's
- 48:05pertaining to retrieve a genetic retrieval or just any retrieval,
- 48:09it's not only semantic search. And this goes back to the Neo 4
- 48:12J and graph Rag kind of question too.
- 48:15But vector search is really vectors and embeddings are going
- 48:21to be the highest density format in which you can store
- 48:23information. You're taking in dense
- 48:27embeddings, you're taking tons of unstructured data.
- 48:29And yes, you're storing that into a fixed dimensional vector,
- 48:33but there's also sparse embeddings.
- 48:35There's also, there's different embedding models.
- 48:37All vectors are is a format and you as you use different
- 48:42embedding models for images and videos and memory conversations
- 48:47and all this like embeddings are just a way, they're a vehicle
- 48:50for this. And we can do keyword search and
- 48:55lexical search and we can do all these different exotic things or
- 48:59maybe exotic strong words, just advanced skilled ways to find
- 49:03the needles in the haystack. And that becomes really
- 49:08important for agentic retrieval because just centering back on
- 49:12agentic retrieval, you want to have access to information in
- 49:18the most efficient way. And we, we have looked at file
- 49:22search and other approaches and there are places for file
- 49:24search. There is not necessarily you
- 49:26must use vector search for everything.
- 49:30You must set up an embedding model and you must set up your
- 49:32chunky. You must do that for everything.
- 49:34It may not make sense in certain scenarios, but when you as we
- 49:39start collecting more data in our, our agents become more
- 49:43sophisticated. Are their search tools become
- 49:48better? I think that vector search has a
- 49:51really strong place there. And I also like intentionally
- 49:54use that term vector search instead of vector database
- 49:57because you want a system that optimizes for not just storing
- 50:04and not just storing and having like a blind retrieval method to
- 50:09get your vectors out. You want to actually have
- 50:12something that is focused on the retrieval side of the equation,
- 50:17the search side of the equation. So like that's why I quadrant we
- 50:20consider ourselves a vector search engine.
- 50:22But yeah, I'll stop kind of rambling there.
- 50:24I don't know if anyone else wants to add thoughts to where
- 50:28they see vector search fitting into agentic retrieval overall.
- 50:35I can jump in on the scale. So Neil mentioned how like we're
- 50:41operating at millions of billions of of vectors scale and
- 50:45search will certainly get much, much bigger.
- 50:48So early search primitives like the BM20 fives of of the world
- 50:52are already 5 orders of magnitude smaller in terms of
- 50:57memory that they consume on the machine with the latest one.
- 51:01And another research that I wanted to share with you comes
- 51:05from the group research group called said one.
- 51:10They have a really interesting approach and they think that
- 51:13reinforcement learning for identic retrieval is the way to
- 51:18get to that next 5 order of magnitude efficient identic
- 51:25retrieval. When the context window gets
- 51:27bigger, when the number of vectors that we're have to parse
- 51:30through, it gets much, much bigger.
- 51:32As I'll share the link so you can read into their approach and
- 51:37why reinforce reinforcement learning exactly.
- 51:41Yeah, I know, Jenny, you had mentioned that earlier too
- 51:43maybe, but can you talk a little bit more to that because I like
- 51:50this idea. We were talking about RL 2 for
- 51:52evals and being able to create these environments, which are
- 51:59super trendy these days, I guess you could say.
- 52:04And so you have these environments and then you can
- 52:07eval them. But the RL for retrieval, what
- 52:10is that even like? Break that down for me a little
- 52:13more. Sure.
- 52:14So what I got out of that paper is that the TLDR is basically
- 52:20they're using a multi turn RL and it's a mixture of synthetic
- 52:24and real questions. So Jenny mentioned before the
- 52:27golden data set and the reinforcement learning approach
- 52:32would be not that we have like human generated golden data set,
- 52:37but it is the environment where you learn, you interact with
- 52:42over time with some real questions that resemble that
- 52:47golden data set. And some of them are completely
- 52:50AI generated. And there needs to be a reward
- 52:54system designed in place that rewards every single time that
- 52:59our agentic system hits the correct answer and punishes it
- 53:03whenever the learning step was not made correctly.
- 53:06So the paper outlines how you can design those, but I, I won't
- 53:11be diving too much in the detail there.
- 53:14So that's the, that's the high level overview of what exactly
- 53:20they're doing there. Yeah, that is so cool to see and
- 53:25I feel like there's so much potential there.
- 53:28The thing that I always wonder, and I also see that folks in the
- 53:32chat are asking this, it's more along the lines of like, hey,
- 53:37I've got this agent. How do I either set up a
- 53:41framework or encourage it to do different kinds of searches or
- 53:50search techniques at different times?
- 53:52So I want to do some kind of semantic search when there's
- 53:56XYZ, like is there a framework? Is there a way that is it a
- 54:00skill that we were talking about earlier that you can say like,
- 54:03hey, agent, here's whenever you need to retrieve something,
- 54:07here's what you should go through.
- 54:09And that feels like probably the easiest.
- 54:12When I see Jenny, you're shaking your head.
- 54:14You might have some thoughts. No, because I think it's
- 54:18exactly, you answer the question, there are two ways,
- 54:20right. There is like the way zero shot
- 54:23way you teach it procedurally, which is like the set of skills,
- 54:28the set of search skills and it has its pros because it's easy
- 54:31enough and you can adopt it easily enough because it's just
- 54:35writing. I mean it's not just, but it's
- 54:38composing the set of instructions and we kind of know
- 54:41how to approach that. And the second branch that we
- 54:44are seeing now emerging is to actively teaching agents to
- 54:49search through this reinforcement learning
- 54:51environments. I don't see now easy ways of any
- 54:56practitioner to do that, but I feel like that might be the next
- 55:01thing in the future because everything becomes more
- 55:03accessible now, right. So maybe we will get our Aral
- 55:07gyms. Do you see my biceps?
- 55:10Yeah, I'm saying the Aral Gym, but we will get them soon where
- 55:14you can actually give the set of what you want to achieve and the
- 55:19set of the search tools and your problem and it will converge to
- 55:23the like the small search agent will be able to converge to a
- 55:27path which actually is, well what you want to see in your
- 55:32specific pipelines. We're going to stay and watch
- 55:36that because we represent kind of the default layer that humans
- 55:42or agents build upon. I wouldn't discard humans steal
- 55:45from all of this picture, by the way, because I'm human.
- 55:49So I still, I still sometimes want to search stuff myself.
- 55:52So I think it's just important to have the tooling which will
- 55:57be usable by all the categories of the search users.
- 56:02I think it was a tautology, but you get me I guess.
- 56:05And I think what we were also trying to say that vector search
- 56:10is also so much more than just retrieving you a semantically
- 56:13similar facts. I feel like we kind of fell into
- 56:17the strap of the rag cage where you just think about it as the
- 56:22machine that spits out you the text chunk based on your
- 56:26question. But I think there are other
- 56:29emerging interesting parts where it could be used for anomaly
- 56:34detection, data analysis at scale, image to text search,
- 56:38videos to whatever audios, so all of that stuff.
- 56:43And at some point agents will be also able to use it 3D.
- 56:46And I'm really looking forward to see how they're going to
- 56:49approach this part of vector search.
- 56:52Well said. I think that is a perfect way to
- 56:58wrap it up. I know that there are still
- 57:01folks in the chat that are stoked and asking questions.
- 57:05I will just mentioned that everyone who is in the chat and
- 57:10watching this right now, on your left hand sidebar there is a
- 57:16button that you can press that says match.
- 57:19If you go there and more than two people do it, you will
- 57:24randomly get put together with somebody else that is watching
- 57:28this. So you can meet someone that is
- 57:31just about as crazy on retrieval as we are, and you can talk to
- 57:38somebody that is watching this too.
- 57:40So it's a great way to bond with the rest of the community if you
- 57:43want to stick around for more time.
- 57:46But for this session, I think we are going to wrap.
- 57:50I know that there are some great places the Quadrant team hangs
- 57:54out. You all have an awesome Discord,
- 57:57so I'll drop a link for that in the chat.
- 58:00And then of course, if you weren't already bought into
- 58:07everything that quadrants do in and following these good folks
- 58:11that are here with us today, you should definitely do that.
- 58:15Go and give Quadrant a star if you haven't already on GitHub
- 58:21and stay up to date with what all of their amazing Devrel is
- 58:27doing. Follow them on LinkedIn and X
- 58:29and all the places. So thanks everyone for this
- 58:33excellent session. I will bid you farewell.
- 58:37And for those that want to hang around, click the match button
- 58:41on the left hand sidebar and I'll see you all later.
- 58:46Thank you. Thanks everyone.
- 58:47Thank you. Thanks to meet you.
- 58:49Bye.