Question and Answer based on Anything

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Table of Contents

• What is QAnything
  • Key features
  • Architecture
• Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
• FAQ
• Usage
  • API Document
• WeChat Group
• Community & Support
• License
• Acknowledgements

What is QAnything?

QAnything(Question and Answer based on Anything) is a local knowledge base question-answering system designed to support a wide range of file formats and databases, allowing for offline installation and use.

With QAnything, you can simply drop any locally stored file of any format and receive accurate, fast, and reliable answers.

Currently supported formats include: PDF, Word (doc/docx), PPT, Markdown, Eml, TXT, Images (jpg, png, etc.), Web links and more formats coming soon…

Key features

• Data Security, supports installation and usage with network cable unplugged throughout the process.
• Cross-language QA support, freely switch between Chinese and English QA, regardless of the language of the document.
• Supports massive data QA, two-stage retrieval ranking, solving the degradation problem of large-scale data retrieval; the more data, the better the performance.
• High-performance production-grade system, directly deployable for enterprise applications.
• User-friendly, no need for cumbersome configurations, one-click installation and deployment, ready to use.
• Multi knowledge base QA Support selecting multiple knowledge bases for Q&A

Architecture

Why 2 stage retrieval?

In scenarios with a large volume of knowledge base data, the advantages of a two-stage approach are very clear. If only a first-stage embedding retrieval is used, there will be a problem of retrieval degradation as the data volume increases, as indicated by the green line in the following graph. However, after the second-stage reranking, there can be a stable increase in accuracy, the more data, the better the performance.

QAnything uses the retrieval component BCEmbedding, which is distinguished for its bilingual and crosslingual proficiency. BCEmbedding excels in bridging Chinese and English linguistic gaps, which achieves

• A high performance on Semantic Representation Evaluations in MTEB;
• A new benchmark in the realm of RAG Evaluations in LlamaIndex.

1st Retrieval（embedding）

Model	Retrieval	STS	PairClassification	Classification	Reranking	Clustering	Avg
bge-base-en-v1.5	37.14	55.06	75.45	59.73	43.05	37.74	47.20
bge-base-zh-v1.5	47.60	63.72	77.40	63.38	54.85	32.56	53.60
bge-large-en-v1.5	37.15	54.09	75.00	59.24	42.68	37.32	46.82
bge-large-zh-v1.5	47.54	64.73	79.14	64.19	55.88	33.26	54.21
jina-embeddings-v2-base-en	31.58	54.28	74.84	58.42	41.16	34.67	44.29
m3e-base	46.29	63.93	71.84	64.08	52.38	37.84	53.54
m3e-large	34.85	59.74	67.69	60.07	48.99	31.62	46.78
bce-embedding-base_v1	57.60	65.73	74.96	69.00	57.29	38.95	59.43

• More evaluation details please check Embedding Models Evaluation Summary。

2nd Retrieval（rerank）

Model	Reranking	Avg
bge-reranker-base	57.78	57.78
bge-reranker-large	59.69	59.69
bce-reranker-base_v1	60.06	60.06

• More evaluation details please check Reranker Models Evaluation Summary

RAG Evaluations in LlamaIndex（embedding and rerank）

NOTE:

• In WithoutReranker setting, our bce-embedding-base_v1 outperforms all the other embedding models.
• With fixing the embedding model, our bce-reranker-base_v1 achieves the best performance.
• The combination of bce-embedding-base_v1 and bce-reranker-base_v1 is SOTA.
• If you want to use embedding and rerank separately, please refer to BCEmbedding

LLM

The open source version of QAnything is based on QwenLM and has been fine-tuned on a large number of professional question-answering datasets. It greatly enhances the ability of question-answering. If you need to use it for commercial purposes, please follow the license of QwenLM. For more details, please refer to: QwenLM

Before You Start

Star us on GitHub, and be instantly notified for new release!

• 🏄 Try QAnything Online
• 📚 Try read.youdao.com | 有道速读
• 🛠️ Only use our BCEmbedding(embedding & rerank)
• 📖 FAQ

Getting Started

Prerequisites

For Linux

System	Required item	Minimum Requirement	Note
Linux	Single NVIDIA GPU Memory or Double NVIDIA GPU Memory	>= 16GB >= 11GB + 5G	NVIDIA 3090 x 1 recommended NVIDIA 2080TI × 2 recommended
	NVIDIA Driver Version	>= 525.105.17
	CUDA Version	>= 12.0
	Docker version	>= 20.10.5	Docker install
	docker compose version	>= 2.23.3	docker compose install

For Winodws 11 with WSL 2

System	Required item	Minimum Requirement	Note
Windows 11 with WSL 2	Single NVIDIA GPU Memory or Double NVIDIA GPU Memory	>= 16GB >= 11GB + 5G	NVIDIA 3090 NVIDIA 2080TI × 2
	GEFORCE EXPERIENCE	>= 546.33	GEFORCE EXPERIENCE download
	Docker Desktop	>= 4.26.1（131620）	Docker Desktop for Windows

Installation

step1: pull qanything repository

git clone https://github.com/netease-youdao/QAnything.git

step2: Enter the project root directory and execute the startup script.

If you are in the Windows11 system: Need to enter the WSL environment.

cd QAnything
bash run.sh  # Start on GPU 0 by default.

(Optional) Specify GPU startup

cd QAnything
bash run.sh 0  # gpu id 0

(Optional) Specify multi-GPU startup

cd QAnything
bash run.sh 0,1  # gpu ids: 0,1, Please confirm how many GPUs are available. Supports up to two cards for startup. 

step3: start to experience

Front end

After successful installation, you can experience the application by entering the following addresses in your web browser.

• Front end address: http://your_host:5052/qanything/

API

If you want to visit API, please refer to the following address:

• API address: http://your_host:8777/api/
• For detailed API documentation, please refer to QAnything API documentation

Close service

If you are in the Windows11 system: Need to enter the WSL environment.

bash close.sh

FAQ

FAQ

Usage

Cross-lingual: Multiple English paper Q&A

multi_paper_qa.mp4

Information extraction

information_extraction.mp4

Various files

various_files_qa.mp4

Web Q&A

web_qa.mp4

API Document

If you need to access the API, please refer to the QAnything API documentation.

Community & Support

Discord

Welcome to the QAnything Discord community

WeChat Group

Welcome to scan the QR code below and join the WeChat group.

Email

If you need to contact our team privately, please reach out to us via the following email:

[email protected]

GitHub issues

Reach out to the maintainer at one of the following places:

• Github issues
• Contact options listed on this GitHub profile

Star History

License

QAnything is licensed under Apache 2.0 License

Acknowledgments

QAnything adopts dependencies from the following:

• Thanks to our BCEmbedding for the excellent embedding and rerank model.
• Thanks to Qwen for strong base language models.
• Thanks to Triton Inference Server for providing great open source inference serving.
• Thanks to FasterTransformer for highly optimized LLM inference backend.
• Thanks to Langchain for the wonderful llm application framework.
• Thanks to Langchain-Chatchat for the inspiration provided on local knowledge base Q&A.
• Thanks to Milvus for the excellent semantic search library.
• Thanks to PaddleOCR for its ease-to-use OCR library.
• Thanks to Sanic for the powerful web service framework.