Build RAG Chatbot with LangChain, pgvector, Google Vertex AI Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and HuggingFace all-mpnet-base-v2

Introduction to RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a game-changer for GenAI applications, especially in conversational AI. It combines the power of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT with external knowledge sources stored in vector databases such as Milvus and Zilliz Cloud, allowing for more accurate, contextually relevant, and up-to-date response generation. A RAG pipeline usually consists of four basic components: a vector database, an embedding model, an LLM, and a framework.

Key Components We'll Use for This RAG Chatbot

This tutorial shows you how to build a simple RAG chatbot in Python using the following components:

LangChain: An open-source framework that helps you orchestrate the interaction between LLMs, vector stores, embedding models, etc, making it easier to integrate a RAG pipeline.
Pgvector: an open-source extension for PostgreSQL that enables efficient storage and querying of high-dimensional vector data, essential for machine learning and AI applications. Designed to handle embeddings, it supports fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) searches using algorithms like HNSW and IVFFlat. Since it is just a vector search add-on to traditional search rather than a purpose-built vector database, it lacks scalability and availability and many other advanced features required by enterprise-level applications. Therefore, if you prefer a much more scalable solution or hate to manage your own infrastructure, we recommend using Zilliz Cloud, which is a fully managed vector database service built on the open-source Milvus and offers a free tier supporting up to 1 million vectors.)
Google Vertex AI Claude 3.5 Sonnet: A refined model within the Claude family, designed for advanced natural language understanding and generation. It balances creativity and coherence, making it well-suited for generating high-quality content, engaging chatbots, and sophisticated text analysis. Its versatility and enhanced capabilities make it ideal for enterprises seeking rich interactive experiences.
HuggingFace all-mpnet-base-v2: This model is a variant of MPNet designed for general-purpose NLP tasks, offering superior performance in sentence embeddings and semantic similarity. It excels in understanding contextual nuances, making it ideal for search, recommendation systems, and any application requiring robust textual comprehension and matching capabilities.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a functional chatbot capable of answering questions based on a custom knowledge base.

Note: Since we may use proprietary models in our tutorials, make sure you have the required API key beforehand.

Step 1: Install and Set Up LangChain

%pip install --quiet --upgrade langchain-text-splitters langchain-community langgraph

Step 2: Install and Set Up Google Vertex AI Claude 3.5 Sonnet

pip install -qU "langchain[google-vertexai]"

# Ensure your VertexAI credentials are configured

from langchain.chat_models import init_chat_model

llm = init_chat_model("claude-3-5-sonnet-v2@20241022", model_provider="google_vertexai")

Step 3: Install and Set Up HuggingFace all-mpnet-base-v2

pip install -qU langchain-huggingface

from langchain_huggingface import HuggingFaceEmbeddings

embeddings = HuggingFaceEmbeddings(model_name="sentence-transformers/all-mpnet-base-v2")

Step 4: Install and Set Up pgvector

pip install -qU langchain-postgres

from langchain_postgres import PGVector

vector_store = PGVector(
    embeddings=embeddings,
    collection_name="my_docs",
    connection="postgresql+psycopg://...",
)

Step 5: Build a RAG Chatbot

Now that you’ve set up all components, let’s start to build a simple chatbot. We’ll use the Milvus introduction doc as a private knowledge base. You can replace it with your own dataset to customize your RAG chatbot.

import bs4
from langchain import hub
from langchain_community.document_loaders import WebBaseLoader
from langchain_core.documents import Document
from langchain_text_splitters import RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter
from langgraph.graph import START, StateGraph
from typing_extensions import List, TypedDict

# Load and chunk contents of the blog
loader = WebBaseLoader(
    web_paths=("https://milvus.io/docs/overview.md",),
    bs_kwargs=dict(
        parse_only=bs4.SoupStrainer(
            class_=("doc-style doc-post-content")
        )
    ),
)

docs = loader.load()

text_splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter(chunk_size=1000, chunk_overlap=200)
all_splits = text_splitter.split_documents(docs)

# Index chunks
_ = vector_store.add_documents(documents=all_splits)

# Define prompt for question-answering
prompt = hub.pull("rlm/rag-prompt")


# Define state for application
class State(TypedDict):
    question: str
    context: List[Document]
    answer: str


# Define application steps
def retrieve(state: State):
    retrieved_docs = vector_store.similarity_search(state["question"])
    return {"context": retrieved_docs}


def generate(state: State):
    docs_content = "\n\n".join(doc.page_content for doc in state["context"])
    messages = prompt.invoke({"question": state["question"], "context": docs_content})
    response = llm.invoke(messages)
    return {"answer": response.content}


# Compile application and test
graph_builder = StateGraph(State).add_sequence([retrieve, generate])
graph_builder.add_edge(START, "retrieve")
graph = graph_builder.compile()

Test the Chatbot

Yeah! You've built your own chatbot. Let's ask the chatbot a question.

response = graph.invoke({"question": "What data types does Milvus support?"})
print(response["answer"])

Example Output

Milvus supports various data types including sparse vectors, binary vectors, JSON, and arrays. Additionally, it handles common numerical and character types, making it versatile for different data modeling needs. This allows users to manage unstructured or multi-modal data efficiently.

Optimization Tips

As you build your RAG system, optimization is key to ensuring peak performance and efficiency. While setting up the components is an essential first step, fine-tuning each one will help you create a solution that works even better and scales seamlessly. In this section, we’ll share some practical tips for optimizing all these components, giving you the edge to build smarter, faster, and more responsive RAG applications.

LangChain optimization tips

To optimize LangChain, focus on minimizing redundant operations in your workflow by structuring your chains and agents efficiently. Use caching to avoid repeated computations, speeding up your system, and experiment with modular design to ensure that components like models or databases can be easily swapped out. This will provide both flexibility and efficiency, allowing you to quickly scale your system without unnecessary delays or complications.

pgvector optimization tips

To optimize pgvector in a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) setup, consider indexing your vectors using GiST or IVFFlat to significantly speed up search queries and improve retrieval performance. Make sure to leverage parallelization for query execution, allowing multiple queries to be processed simultaneously, especially for large datasets. Optimize memory usage by tuning the vector storage size and using compressed embeddings where possible. To further enhance query speed, implement pre-filtering techniques to narrow down search space before querying. Regularly rebuild indexes to ensure they are up to date with any new data. Fine-tune vectorization models to reduce dimensionality without sacrificing accuracy, thus improving both storage efficiency and retrieval times. Finally, manage resource allocation carefully, utilizing horizontal scaling for larger datasets and offloading intensive operations to dedicated processing units to maintain responsiveness during high-traffic periods.

Google Vertex AI Claude 3.5 Sonnet optimization tips

Claude 3.5 Sonnet on Google Vertex AI provides a strong balance between speed and depth. Improve retrieval by implementing intelligent reranking techniques that prioritize high-relevance documents. Structure prompts efficiently, with a logical flow to guide the model’s response. Keep temperature settings around 0.1–0.3, adjusting top-k and top-p to fine-tune diversity and precision. Leverage Google’s AI infrastructure for auto-scaling and load balancing to maintain optimal performance. Caching frequently used queries can reduce latency and API costs. In a multi-model deployment, assign Sonnet to handle general-purpose queries while reserving Opus for the most complex requests.

HuggingFace all-mpnet-base-v2 optimization tips

HuggingFace all-mpnet-base-v2 is a robust and efficient embedding model that excels in semantic understanding for RAG tasks. Optimize retrieval by reducing text noise before embedding, ensuring that only meaningful content is processed. Use approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search with FAISS or a similar framework to accelerate query resolution without compromising quality. Implement dimensionality reduction techniques to save memory and reduce computational overhead. Leverage caching strategies for frequently queried text embeddings to minimize API calls and improve latency. Fine-tune the embedding model on task-specific data to improve accuracy and relevance in your search results. When scaling, use parallel processing for large datasets and batch embedding operations to optimize throughput.

By implementing these tips across your components, you'll be able to enhance the performance and functionality of your RAG system, ensuring it’s optimized for both speed and accuracy. Keep testing, iterating, and refining your setup to stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of AI development.

RAG Cost Calculator: A Free Tool to Calculate Your Cost in Seconds

Estimating the cost of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline involves analyzing expenses across vector storage, compute resources, and API usage. Key cost drivers include vector database queries, embedding generation, and LLM inference.

RAG Cost Calculator is a free tool that quickly estimates the cost of building a RAG pipeline, including chunking, embedding, vector storage/search, and LLM generation. It also helps you identify cost-saving opportunities and achieve up to 10x cost reduction on vector databases with the serverless option.

Calculate your RAG cost now.

Calculate your RAG cost

What Have You Learned?

By diving into this tutorial, you’ve unlocked the power of combining cutting-edge tools to build a fully functional RAG system! You learned how LangChain acts as the glue, seamlessly orchestrating workflows between components like a pro. With pgvector as your vector database, you’ve seen how to store and retrieve embeddings efficiently, turning unstructured data into actionable insights. Google Vertex AI’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet stepped in as your LLM powerhouse, delivering human-like reasoning and context-aware responses, while Hugging Face’s all-mpnet-base-v2 embedding model transformed text into rich numerical representations, ensuring your semantic searches hit the mark every time. Together, these tools form a dynamic pipeline that breathes life into your data, enabling applications like intelligent chatbots, personalized search engines, or real-time knowledge assistants. Plus, you picked up optimization tricks—like tuning chunk sizes and balancing latency with accuracy—to keep your RAG system lean and mean.

But wait, there’s more! You also discovered tools like the free RAG cost calculator to estimate expenses and optimize budgets, making your projects not just powerful but also cost-effective. Now that you’ve seen how these pieces fit together, the real magic begins. Imagine the projects you could build—automating workflows, enhancing customer experiences, or uncovering hidden patterns in data. You’ve got the blueprint; it’s time to experiment, iterate, and innovate. Tweak parameters, swap models, or scale your database—your creativity is the limit. So fire up your IDE, load up those APIs, and start building. The future of intelligent applications is in your hands, and trust us—it’s going to be awesome. Let’s go make something incredible! 🚀

Further Resources

🌟 In addition to this RAG tutorial, unleash your full potential with these incredible resources to level up your RAG skills.

How to Build a Multimodal RAG | Documentation
How to Enhance the Performance of Your RAG Pipeline
Graph RAG with Milvus | Documentation
How to Evaluate RAG Applications - Zilliz Learn
Generative AI Resource Hub | Zilliz

We'd Love to Hear What You Think!

We’d love to hear your thoughts! 🌟 Leave your questions or comments below or join our vibrant Milvus Discord community to share your experiences, ask questions, or connect with thousands of AI enthusiasts. Your journey matters to us!

If you like this tutorial, show your support by giving our Milvus GitHub repo a star ⭐—it means the world to us and inspires us to keep creating! 💖