Domain-Driven LLM Development: Insights into RAG and Fine-Tuning Practices

To improve Large Language Model (LLM) performance on domain specific applications, ML developers often leverage Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and LLM Fine-Tuning. RAG extends the capabilities of LLMs to specific domains or an organization's internal knowledge base, without the need to retrain the model. On the other hand, Fine-Tuning approach updates LLM weights with domain-specific data to improve performance on specific tasks. The fine-tuned model is particularly effective to systematically learn new comprehensive knowledge in a specific domain that is not covered by the LLM pre-training. This tutorial walks through the RAG and Fine-Tuning techniques, discusses the insights of their advantages and limitations, and provides best practices of adopting the methodologies for the LLM tasks and use cases. The hands-on labs demonstrate the advanced techniques to optimize the RAG and fine-tuned LLM architecture that handles domain specific LLM tasks. The labs in the tutorial are designed by using a set of open-source python libraries to implement the RAG and fine-tuned LLM architecture.