Week 14: Tools, RAG, and final presentations

DATA 443/643 · Week 14

Module 4 — Tools, RAG, and final presentations

Notes

• 14.1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation(slides)
• 14.2 ReAct and Tool Use(slides)
• 14.3 Evaluating Applications and Giving the Talk(slides)

Labs

• Lab 14: A Five-Document RAG Loop(PDF)

Videos

• Karpathy: Intro to Large Language Models (browser as retrieve-then-read, 27:43–33:32)
• Simon Peyton Jones: How to give a great research talk (watch 0:00–20:00)

Additional readings

• Stanford CS224N 2026 L10: RAG and language agents (ReAct vs CoT vs SC)
• Lewis et al., Retrieval-augmented generation
• Yao et al., ReAct: synergizing reasoning and acting

Discussion

• Week 10.3 RAFT vs this week’s RAG stack: which one changes weights?
• q = library close: cosine 1, 0.707, 0. What does k=2 stuff, and how can that hurt?
• CoT invents 428; ReAct gets observation 408 and still says 428. What broke?
• Mean RAG lift +2 pp, seed spread 4 pp, n=50. What sentence belongs on the talk slide?