What is Self-RAG / adaptive retrieval, and how does the model decide when to retrieve?
Always retrieving is wasteful and sometimes harmful; never retrieving hallucinates. Self-RAG makes retrieval a decision the model controls, then critiques what it got back. The signal is the retrieve-on-demand plus self-critique loop.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Always retrieving is wasteful and sometimes harmful; never retrieving hallucinates. Self-RAG makes retrieval a decision the model controls, then critiques what it got back. The signal is the retrieve-on-demand plus self-critique loop.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.