Build powerful RAG pipelines with LlamaIndex and Amazon Bedrock

This post was co-written with Jerry Liu from LlamaIndex.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). By combining the vast knowledge stored in external data sources with the generative power of LLMs, RAG enables you to tackle complex tasks that require both knowledge and creativity. Today, RAG techniques are used in every enterprise, small and large, where generative artificial intelligence (AI) is used as an enabler for solving document-based question answering and other types of analysis.

Although building a simple RAG system is straightforward, building production RAG systems using advanced patterns is challenging. A production RAG pipeline typically operates over a larger data volume and larger data complexity, and must meet a higher quality bar compared to building a proof of concept. A general broad challenge that developers face is low response quality; the RAG pipeline is not able to sufficiently answer a large number of questions. This can be due to a variety of reasons; the following are some of the most common:

Bad retrievals – The relevant context needed to answer the question is missing.
Incomplete responses – The relevant context is partially there but not completely. The generated output doesn’t fully answer the input question.
Hallucinations – The relevant context is there but the model is not able to extract the relevant information in order to answer the question.

This necessitates more advanced RAG techniques on the query understanding, retrieval, and generation components in order to handle these failure modes.

This is where LlamaIndex comes in. LlamaIndex is an open source library with both simple and advanced techniques that enables developers to build production RAG pipelines. It provides a flexible and modular framework for building and querying document indexes, integrating with various LLMs, and implementing advanced RAG patterns.

Amazon Bedrock is a managed service providing access to high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI providers through a unified API. It offers a wide range of large models to choose from, along with capabilities to securely build and customize generative AI applications. Key advanced features include model customization with fine-tuning and continued pre-training using your own data, as well as RAG to augment model outputs by retrieving context from configured knowledge bases containing your private data sources. You can also create intelligent agents that orchestrate FMs with enterprise systems and data. Other enterprise capabilities include provisioned throughput for guaranteed low-latency inference at scale, model evaluation to compare performance, and AI guardrails to implement safeguards. Amazon Bedrock abstracts away infrastructure management through a fully managed, serverless experience.

In this post, we explore how to use LlamaIndex to build advanced RAG pipelines with Amazon Bedrock. We discuss how to set up the following:

Simple RAG pipeline – Set up a RAG pipeline in LlamaIndex with Amazon Bedrock models and top-k vector search
Router query – Add an automated router that can dynamically do semantic search (top-k) or summarization over data
Sub-question query – Add a query decomposition layer that can decompose complex queries into multiple simpler ones, and run them with the relevant tools
Agentic RAG – Build a stateful agent that can do the preceding components (tool use, query decomposition), but also maintain state-like conversation history and reasoning over time

Simple RAG pipeline

At its core, RAG involves retrieving relevant information from external data sources and using it to augment the prompts fed to an LLM. This allows the LLM to generate responses that are grounded in factual knowledge and tailored to the specific query.

For RAG workflows in Amazon Bedrock, documents from configured knowledge bases go through preprocessing, where they are split into chunks, embedded into vectors, and indexed in a vector database. This allows efficient retrieval of relevant information at runtime. When a user query comes in, the same embedding model is used to convert the query text into a vector representation. This query vector is compared against the indexed document vectors to identify the most semantically similar chunks from the knowledge base. The retrieved chunks provide additional context related to the user’s query. This contextual information is appended to the original user prompt before being passed to the FM to generate a response. By augmenting the prompt with relevant data pulled from the knowledge base, the model’s output is able to use and be informed by an organization’s proprietary information sources. This RAG process can also be orchestrated by agents, which use the FM to determine when to query the knowledge base and how to incorporate the retrieved context into the workflow.

The following diagram illustrates this workflow.

The following is a simplified example of a RAG pipeline using LlamaIndex:

The pipeline includes the following steps:

Use the SimpleDirectoryReader to load documents from the “data/”
Create a VectorStoreIndex from the loaded documents. This type of index converts documents into numerical representations (vectors) that capture their semantic meaning.
Query the index with the question “What is the capital of France?” The index uses similarity measures to identify the documents most relevant to the query.
The retrieved documents are then used to augment the prompt for the LLM, which generates a response based on the combined information.

LlamaIndex goes beyond simple RAG and enables the implementation of more sophisticated patterns, which we discuss in the following sections.

Router query

RouterQueryEngine allows you to route queries to different indexes or query engines based on the nature of the query. For example, you could route summarization questions to a summary index and factual questions to a vector store index.

The following is a code snippet from the example notebooks demonstrating RouterQueryEngine:

Sub-question query

SubQuestionQueryEngine breaks down complex queries into simpler sub-queries and then combines the answers from each sub-query to generate a comprehensive response. This is particularly useful for queries that span across multiple documents. It first breaks down the complex query into sub-questions for each relevant data source, then gathers the intermediate responses and synthesizes a final response that integrates the relevant information from each sub-query. For example, if the original query was “What is the population of the capital city of the country with the highest GDP in Europe,” the engine would first break it down into sub-queries like “What is the highest GDP country in Europe,” “What is the capital city of that country,” and “What is the population of that capital city,” and then combine the answers to those sub-queries into a final comprehensive response.

The following is an example of using SubQuestionQueryEngine:

Agentic RAG

An agentic approach to RAG uses an LLM to reason about the query and determine which tools (such as indexes or query engines) to use and in what sequence. This allows for a more dynamic and adaptive RAG pipeline. The following architecture diagram shows how agentic RAG works on Amazon Bedrock.

Agentic RAG in Amazon Bedrock combines the capabilities of agents and knowledge bases to enable RAG workflows. Agents act as intelligent orchestrators that can query knowledge bases during their workflow to retrieve relevant information and context to augment the responses generated by the FM.

After the initial preprocessing of the user input, the agent enters an orchestration loop. In this loop, the agent invokes the FM, which generates a rationale outlining the next step the agent should take. One potential step is to query an attached knowledge base to retrieve supplemental context from the indexed documents and data sources.

If a knowledge base query is deemed beneficial, the agent invokes an InvokeModel call specifically for knowledge base response generation. This fetches relevant document chunks from the knowledge base based on semantic similarity to the current context. These retrieved chunks provide additional information that is included in the prompt sent back to the FM. The model then generates an observation response that is parsed and can invoke further orchestration steps, like invoking external APIs (through action group AWS Lambda functions) or provide a final response to the user. This agentic orchestration augmented by knowledge base retrieval continues until the request is fully handled.

One example of an agent orchestration loop is the ReAct agent, which was initially introduced by Yao et al. ReAct interleaves chain-of-thought and tool use. At every stage, the agent takes in the input task along with the previous conversation history and decides whether to invoke a tool (such as querying a knowledge base) with the appropriate input or not.

The following is an example of using the ReAct agent with the LlamaIndex SDK:

The ReAct agent will analyze the query and decide whether to use the Lyft 10K tool or another tool to answer the question. To try out agentic RAG, refer to the GitHub repo.

LlamaCloud and LlamaParse

LlamaCloud represents a significant advancement in the LlamaIndex landscape, offering a comprehensive suite of managed services tailored for enterprise-grade context augmentation within LLM and RAG applications. This service empowers AI engineers to concentrate on developing core business logic by streamlining the intricate process of data wrangling.

One key component is LlamaParse, a proprietary parsing engine adept at handling complex, semi-structured documents replete with embedded objects like tables and figures, seamlessly integrating with LlamaIndex’s ingestion and retrieval pipelines. Another key component is the Managed Ingestion and Retrieval API, which facilitates effortless loading, processing, and storage of data from diverse sources, including LlamaParse outputs and LlamaHub’s centralized data repository, while accommodating various data storage integrations.

Collectively, these features enable the processing of vast production data volumes, culminating in enhanced response quality and unlocking unprecedented capabilities in context-aware question answering for RAG applications. To learn more about these features, refer to Introducing LlamaCloud and LlamaParse.

For this post, we use LlamaParse to showcase the integration with Amazon Bedrock. LlamaParse is an API created by LlamaIndex to efficiently parse and represent files for efficient retrieval and context augmentation using LlamaIndex frameworks. What is unique about LlamaParse is that it is the world’s first generative AI native document parsing service, which allows users to submit documents along with parsing instructions. The key insight behind parsing instructions is that you know what kind of documents you have, so you already know what kind of output you want. The following figure shows a comparison of parsing a complex PDF with LlamaParse vs. two popular open source PDF parsers.

A green highlight in a cell means that the RAG pipeline correctly returned the cell value as the answer to a question over that cell. A red highlight means that the question was answered incorrectly.

Integrate Amazon Bedrock and LlamaIndex to build an Advanced RAG Pipeline

In this section, we show you how to build an advanced RAG stack combining LlamaParse and LlamaIndex with Amazon Bedrock services – LLMs, embedding models, and Bedrock Knowledge Base.

To use LlamaParse with Amazon Bedrock, you can follow these high-level steps:

Download your source documents.
Send the documents to LlamaParse using the Python SDK:

Wait for the parsing job to finish and upload the resulting Markdown documents to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Create an Amazon Bedrock knowledge base using the source documents.
Choose your preferred embedding and generation model from Amazon Bedrock using the LlamaIndex SDK:

Implement an advanced RAG pattern using LlamaIndex. In the following example, we use SubQuestionQueryEngine and a retriever specially created for Amazon Bedrock knowledge bases:

Finally, query the index with your question:

We tested Llamaparse on a real-world, challenging example of asking questions about a document containing Bank of America Q3 2023 financial results. An example slide from the full slide deck (48 complex slides!) is shown below.

Using the procedure outlined above, we asked “What is the trend in digital households/relationships from 3Q20 to 3Q23?”; take a look at the answer generated using Llamaindex tools vs. the reference answer from human annotation.

LlamaIndex + LlamaParse answer
Reference answer

The trend in digital households/relationships shows a steady increase from 3Q20 to 3Q23. In 3Q20, the number of digital households/relationships was 550K, which increased to 645K in 3Q21, then to 672K in 3Q22, and further to 716K in 3Q23. This indicates consistent growth in the adoption of digital services among households and relationships over the reported quarters.
The trend shows a steady increase in digital households/relationships from 645,000 in 3Q20 to 716,000 in 3Q23. The digital adoption percentage also increased from 76% to 83% over the same period.

The following are example notebooks to try out these steps on your own examples. Note the prerequisite steps and cleanup resources after testing them.

Ingest with LlamaParse into S3 for KB
Agentic RAG with Bedrock KB and LlamaIndex SubQuestionQueryEngine

Conclusion

In this post, we explored various advanced RAG patterns with LlamaIndex and Amazon Bedrock. To delve deeper into the capabilities of LlamaIndex and its integration with Amazon Bedrock, check out the following resources:

LlamaIndex documentation
Amazon Bedrock User Guide
LlamaIndex examples GitHub repo

By combining the power of LlamaIndex and Amazon Bedrock, you can build robust and sophisticated RAG pipelines that unlock the full potential of LLMs for knowledge-intensive tasks.

About the Author

Shreyas Subramanian is a Principal data scientist and helps customers by using Machine Learning to solve their business challenges using the AWS platform. Shreyas has a background in large scale optimization and Machine Learning, and in use of Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning for accelerating optimization tasks.

Jerry Liu is the co-founder/CEO of LlamaIndex, a data framework for building LLM applications. Before this, he has spent his career at the intersection of ML, research, and startups. He led the ML monitoring team at Robust Intelligence, did self-driving AI research at Uber ATG, and worked on recommendation systems at Quora.