Offline evaluation
Testing your system against a fixed dataset of past examples, not real users.
Think of it like
A flight simulator — you practice on the ground before flying.
Example
Running your retrieval system against 1000 Q&A pairs before deploying it to production.
How it actually works
Offline eval is fast and cheap but can miss real-world failures. Users ask questions offline eval never saw. Traffic patterns, edge cases, and adversarial inputs appear only once you're live. This is why online evaluation exists.
For product teams
Necessary but not sufficient. Use to gate deployment, but plan for online eval post-launch.
For engineers
Batch process against fixed examples. Log results, compute aggregate metrics, generate reports.
Related
- Paired with online evaluation.
- Baseline metric before launch.
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