I’m wondering how to detect that there are no relevant matches in a specialized RAG. Could you add some “ringer” articles that are broadly relevant? If they come up first, there’s no good match.
Another way to do this could be to calculate the "average" of all of the embeddings of documents in the index, then try to figure out if the query embeds to a point that's a significant distance from that average. Maybe figure out that distance through experimentation?