As of v0.8, RAGFlow is officially entering the Agentic era, offering a comprehensive graph-based task orchestration framework on the back-end and a no-code workflow editor on the front-end. Why agentic? How does this feature differ from existing workflow orchestration systems?

The workflow of a naive RAG system can be summarized as follows: the RAG system does retrieval from a specified data source using the user query, reranks the retrieval results, appends prompts, and sends them to the LLM for final answer generation.

A naive RAG suffices in scenarios where the user's intent is evident, as the answer is included in the retrieved results and can be sent directly to the LLM. Yet, in most circumstances ambiguous user intents are the norm and demand iterative queries to generate the final answer. For instance, questions involving summarizing multiple documents require multi-step reasoning. These scenarios necessitate Agentic RAG, which involves task orchestration mechanisms during the question-answering process.

Agent and RAG complement each other. Agentic RAG, as the name suggests, is an agent-based RAG. The major distinction between an agentic RAG and a naive RAG is that agentic RAG introduces a dynamic agent orchestration mechanism, which criticizes retrievals, rewrites query according to the intent of each user query, and employs "multi-hop" reasoning to handle complex question-answering tasks.

RAGFlow v0.6.0 was released this week, solving many ease-of-use and stability issues that emerged since it was open sourced earlier this April. Future releases of RAGFlow will focus on tackling the deep-seated problems of RAG capability. Hate to say it, existing RAG solutions in the market are still in POC (Proof of Concept) stage and can’t be applied directly to real production scenarios.