RAG Classifications, Architectures: A Field Guide for Production-Grade Systems

Basic RAG often breaks in real production due to poor chunking, semantic mismatch, multi-hop queries, irrelevant retrieval, and unsupported generation.

The article compares naive, advanced, and modular RAG, and highlights upgrades such as query rewriting, HyDE, re-ranking, and contextual filtering.

It also surveys eight production patterns: Standard, Hybrid, GraphRAG, CRAG, Self-RAG, Adaptive RAG, Agentic RAG, and Multi-Modal RAG.

The main takeaway is to match RAG design to the failure mode instead of assuming one pipeline fits every query.