What Is RAG Architecture? A Full Definition With Detailed Practical Examples
Perplexity, Monday, October 26th, 2026
Perplexity defines RAG architecture, its core components, and 10 common variants, with two worked pipeline examples.
Retrieval augmented generation lets large language models draw on external information, and RAG architecture is the set of components that makes this possible.
A typical system has an information source such as a vector database, a retrieval component, and an orchestration layer that adds results to the prompt, organized into separate ingestion and retrieval paths.
The article covers 10 overlapping types, including hybrid, adaptive, corrective, self-RAG, agentic, multimodal, GraphRAG, and HyDE, and calls agentic RAG the main approach in mainstream chatbots.
Two examples show a simple vector-database pipeline and an agentic workflow combining several sources and a calculator.