Continued Pretraining vs RAG: Hands-on Comparison on a Qwen 4B Model
funJS · reddit · 2026-09-12
The author ran a hands-on experiment comparing two ways to feed a model domain knowledge: continued pretraining (CPT) on Qwen 3.5 4B versus a RAG implementation over the base model, measuring accuracy and performance to quantify internalizing knowledge vs retrieving on-the-fly. The write-up covers methodology and findings, offering a useful reference for developers deciding between the two approaches on private data: CPT is costlier but needs no retrieval pipeline, while RAG updates knowledge more flexibly.
Related event: Benchmarking Continued Pretraining vs RAG on Qwen 3.5 4B(4 posts)→
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