Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 4 minutes ago

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Nandan Thakur is a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo! Nandan has worked on many of the most impactful works in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Information Retrieval. His work ranges from benchmarks such as BEIR, MIRACLE, TREC, and FreshStack, to improving the training of embedding models and re-rankings, and more!

Links:
Nandan Thakur: thakur-nandan.github.io
FreshStack Benchmarks: fresh-stack.github.io
BEIR Benchmarks: arxiv.org/abs/2104.08663
BrowseComp: arxiv.org/abs/2504.12516
Sufficient Context: arxiv.org/abs/2411.06037

Check out the Weaviate Query Agent! weaviate.io/developers/agents/query


Chapters
0:00 Welcome Nandan!
1:15 The BEIR Benchmarks
8:25 Evolution of RAG Benchmarks
12:25 Diversity in Search Results
18:20 Reasoning and Query Writing
23:03 Search Result Summarization
26:10 Looping Searches
29:45 High Recall Search
33:10 Paginating Search Results
38:05 Searching with Filters
44:35 Mixture of Retrievers
51:08 Creating FreshStack Weaviate
1:00:35 Exciting Directions for AI