After an intense summer full of new ideas, refactoring and new people joining, the A2RCHI v1.2.0 Release is out and among others includes Multi-Configuration Support, Hybrid Search, and a Benchmarking Framework. It is bringing over 200 commits of architectural improvements, new retrieval methods, and tooling for systematic evaluation. Get A2RCHI v1.2.0 from the GitHub repository.

Key Updates

The Benchmarking Framework provides comprehensive tooling for evaluating A2RCHI configurations:

• Two main modes for evaluation: checking for correct source retrieval and Ragas implementation for various metrics to grade answers
• Support for multiple evaluation LLMs and providers
• Configurable timeout, embedding model, verbosity, and batch size
• Query configuration via queries.json
• Visualization and plotting tools
• Dedicated benchmarking documentation

This framework enables systematic comparison of different retrieval strategies, prompt configurations, and model choices with quantifiable metrics. New LLM Integrations include full Ollama support for local model inference with configurable GPU allocation, enhanced vLLM integration, and improved HuggingFace compatibility. Hybrid Search with BM25 combines semantic search with keyword matching for improved retrieval accuracy. Optional document stemming is now configurable for both documents and queries, particularly useful for technical documentation. Multi-Configuration Support allows running multiple prompt configurations simultaneously with on-the-fly switching through a UI dropdown. Different configurations can now be tested and deployed for specific use cases without redeployment.

Additional Features

• Git Repository Scraper ingests documentation directly from repositories with automatic MkDocs detection
• Optimized Docker Images with GPU and non-GPU variants available on DockerHub for faster deployments
• ChromaDB REST API provides programmatic access to the vector store with document listing and search endpoints
• GitHub Actions CI/CD with automated testing and PR preview environments

Documentation & Resources

• Full Release Notes – Complete changelog
• Documentation – User and developer guides
• GitHub Repository – Source code and issues
• Benchmarking Guide – Evaluation documentation

Breaking Changes

Configuration structure has been refactored. The chain section is now pipelines, and several configuration keys have been reorganized. Existing configuration files will need migration. See the full release notes for details.