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AI / LlamaIndex Interview Questions

What is the purpose of LlamaIndex in a RAG pipeline?

In a RAG pipeline, LlamaIndex's job is to bridge the gap between raw, unstructured data and an LLM that can only reason over text placed directly in its prompt.

It does this in three stages. First, ingestion: loading documents and splitting them into smaller Nodes. Second, indexing: embedding those Nodes and storing them so they can be searched efficiently. Third, querying: retrieving the most relevant Nodes for a user's question and passing them, along with the question, to an LLM to generate a grounded answer.

Without a framework like LlamaIndex, a developer would have to hand-write chunking logic, embedding calls, similarity search, and prompt assembly separately for every project.

The three stages LlamaIndex manages in a RAG pipeline are:
Without a framework like LlamaIndex, a developer would need to:

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What is LlamaIndex? What is the purpose of LlamaIndex in a RAG pipeline? What are Documents and Nodes in LlamaIndex? What is a VectorStoreIndex? What are the types of indices in LlamaIndex? What is a query engine in LlamaIndex? What is a retriever in LlamaIndex? What is a response synthesizer? What is Settings in LlamaIndex? What is a node parser or text splitter in LlamaIndex? How do you use SimpleDirectoryReader? What is LlamaHub? Describe the ingestion pipeline in LlamaIndex? What is a chat engine in LlamaIndex? What are the response modes available in LlamaIndex query engines? What is the difference between VectorStoreIndex and SummaryIndex? How does similarity_top_k affect retrieval? What is the difference between a query engine and a chat engine? How do node postprocessors work in LlamaIndex? Why should you use metadata filtering in retrieval? What is the difference between refine and compact response modes? How does the SubQuestionQueryEngine work? What is a RouterQueryEngine and when would you use it? Why is chunk size important in LlamaIndex? How do you persist and reload an index in LlamaIndex? What is the difference between LlamaIndex and LangChain? How does the SentenceWindowNodeParser improve retrieval quality? When should you use auto-merging retrieval? What is HyDE and how does it help retrieval? How do you integrate a custom vector store like Pinecone or Chroma with LlamaIndex? What is the difference between ReActAgent and FunctionCallingAgent? How does LlamaIndex support structured data querying such as SQL? Why use CohereRerank or LLMRerank as a node postprocessor? What is the role of the CallbackManager in LlamaIndex? How do you evaluate a LlamaIndex RAG pipeline for faithfulness? Explain the execution flow of a query in a VectorStoreIndex-based query engine? Explain the internal working of the IngestionPipeline caching mechanism? Explain the lifecycle of a Node from Document to retrieval? What is the difference between PropertyGraphIndex and KnowledgeGraphIndex? How can you optimize token usage and cost in a large-scale LlamaIndex deployment? Explain the internal working of AgentWorkflow and event-driven workflows in LlamaIndex? How do you troubleshoot poor retrieval relevance in a LlamaIndex application? What happens internally when you call index.as_query_engine()? How does LlamaIndex handle asynchronous querying at scale? Explain the difference between the low-level composition API and the high-level API in LlamaIndex? Why doesn't increasing similarity_top_k always improve answer quality? How do you design a hybrid search system combining vector and keyword retrieval in LlamaIndex? Explain the internal working of tree_summarize response synthesis? How would you architect a multi-tenant LlamaIndex application with metadata filtering per tenant? Which is better and why: sentence-window retrieval vs auto-merging retrieval for long documents?
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