Neural Mastery

RAG Pipeline Simulator

A real (if simplified) retrieval pipeline from RAG, running in your browser: real fixed-size chunking, real bag-of-words cosine-similarity ranking, and a real reranking pass — not a scripted animation.

Interactive
RAG Pipeline Simulator
Chunk size
Reranker
Document
Chunking
Embeddings
Vector Store
Query
Retrieval
Reranker (on)
LLM
Answer
24 chunks indexed · showing top 3
#139.7% match
Gradient descent updates parameters by stepping in the direction opposite the gradient of the loss function.
#233.3% match
The learning rate controls step size: too large causes divergence or oscillation, too small makes training
#313.4% match
by setting the gradient of the loss to zero.
Real chunking, real bag-of-words cosine-similarity retrieval, and a real (if simplified) reranking pass -- type any question about the topics covered in the demo corpus and watch retrieval actually respond.

What to Try

  • Ask about each topic in the demo corpus — linear regression, gradient descent, overfitting, decision trees, CNNs, attention, the KV cache, and RAG itself — and watch different chunks surface each time.
  • Shrink the chunk size to 8 words and watch retrieval get noisier — smaller chunks carry less context, so cosine similarity has less signal to work with, directly the "too small loses context" tradeoff.
  • Toggle the reranker off and compare the ranking — the reranker here specifically rewards exact multi-word phrase overlap the bag-of-words retrieval score alone doesn't capture, a small-scale stand-in for why a real cross-encoder reranker improves precision over the fast first-pass retrieval.
  • Click any node in the diagram for a one-line explanation of what that stage does.
  • Try a question that doesn't match the corpus well ("what's the capital of France?") and watch every match score drop — real evidence that retrieval quality depends entirely on whether the answer's content actually exists in the indexed corpus, not on how the question is phrased.

Back to Visual Lab Overview.

Last updated Sep 5, 2026Edit this pageReport an issue
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