RAG Without Revealing Your Docs — AI Innovations and Insights 71

Have you thought seriously about document privacy in RAG pipelines? This article might provide a direction that could help.

Why “Standard RAG → Cloud Search” doesn’t Fly for Privacy

Standard RAG works by stuffing plain-text documents into the prompt. That’s a non-starter when your inputs are enterprise contracts, medical records, or personal notes—you're exposing sensitive data by design.

Parametric RAG (PRAG) tries to “bake the knowledge into LoRA weights,” but it runs into two practical walls:

1. Operational drag and latency. Each document needs its own synthetic Q&A generation and a bespoke LoRA fine-tune. At serving time, juggling those adapters makes real-world latency and ops overhead untenable.

2. Representation misalignment. What the model learns from synthetic Q&A often doesn’t line up with how standard RAG represents and retrieves information. The result is weak generalization on out-of-distribution inputs.